9u2sg Fluid Screens Expanded Cinema Digital Futures

FL U I D S C R E E N S , E X PA N DE D C I N E M A
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Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema
Edited by
JANINE MARCHESSAULT AND SUSAN LORD
U N I V E R S I T Y O F T O R O N TO P R E S S
Toronto Buffalo London
www.utppublishing.com
University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2007
Toronto Buffalo London
Printed in Canada
ISBN 978-0-8020-9297-7 (cloth)
Printed on acid-free paper
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Fluid screens, expanded cinema / Janine Marchessault, Susan Lord, editors.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8020-9297-7
1. Motion pictures. 2. Digital media. 3. Interactive multimedia.
4. Technology and the arts. I. Marchessault, Janine II. Lord, Susan, 1959
PN1994.F58 2007
791.43c02985
C2007-901486-0
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario
Arts Council.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support for its
publishing activities of the Government of Canada through the Book
Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP).
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction 3
janine marchessault and susan lord
PART I. EXPANDING CINEMA IMMERSION
1
Multi-Screens and Future Cinema: The Labyrinth Project at

Expo 67 29
janine marchessault
Sounds Complicated: What Sixties Audio Experiments Can Teach

Us about the New Media Environments 52
stephen crocker
The Networked Screen: Moving Images, Materiality, and the

Aesthetics of Size 74
haidee wasson
The Iterative Circle: Transformation of Web Narrative in

Amika 96
sheila petty
Handcrank That Globalism: A Digi-Dialogue

abigail child
From Photography to Imography: New Media as Metaphor

ron burnett
111
126
vi
Contents
PART II. DIGITAL TIME ARCHIVE

7 Feminist Digital Aesthetics: The Everyday and Yesterday 145
caitlin fisher
8 The Sight of Sound: The Last Angel of History
rinaldo walcott
160
9 History and Histrionics: Vision Machines Digital Poetics

michael uwemedimo and joshua oppenheimer
177
10 From Sequence to Stream: Historiography and Media Art 192

susan lord
11 The Birth of Tragedy in Digital Aesthetics
glenn willmott
210
PART III. LIQUID SPACE MOBILITY

12 Armed Vision and the Banalization of War: Full Spectrum
Warrior 231
nick dyer-witheford and greig de peuter
13 The Dialectics of Canadian Film Labour: Technology, Globalization,
Nation 251
john m c cullough
14 Screening the Call: Cell Phones, Activism, and the Art of
Connection 270
kirsty robertson
15 Immigrant Semiosis
laura u. marks
284
16 Precepts for Digital Artwork

sean cubitt
304
Afterword: What We Must Do 321

gene youngblood
Bibliography
327
Contributors
341
Index
349
Acknowledgments
We wish to express our deepest gratitude to our contributors, who

have been so patient throughout the process of putting this collection
together. Their brilliance as engaged activists, scholars, and artists has
opened up many new paths for thinking about screens and new media.
The initial idea for this anthology developed from a symposium
hosted by Images Festival for Independent Film and Media in Toronto
several years ago, and we are grateful to the organizers of the festival
for their enthusiastic efforts. The Department of Film at York University
and the Department of Film and Media at Queens University gave
much-needed technical and administrative support for the book.
Sunny Kerr and Aime Mitchell provided vital research and editorial
assistance along the way. Pam Smith, Ya-Yin Ko, Jennifer VanderBurgh,
and Brian Hotson brought the project to its conclusion, and we thank
them for their painstaking work in helping to organize the different
drafts of the manuscript. We owe special thanks to Claire Christie for
her inspired cover design and to Philip Hoffman for his permission to
reproduce the cover image.
We are tremendously appreciative of the two anonymous readers
reports, which offered detailed and incisive comments on the manuscript. We would also like to thank the editors of the Digital Futures
Series, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, for their insightful suggestions
and for including this book in their series. It goes without saying that
this book could not have come to fruition without the expert editorial
team at the University of Toronto Press.
Finally, we are indebted to Gene Youngblood for his generous conversations with us. His writings on expanded cinema provide the
ground from which to think through the idea of fluid screens.
FL U I D S C R E E N S , E X PA N DE D C I N E M A
Introduction
jan i n e m a rch e ssau lt a nd s u sa n l o r d
And you cant help but arrive at the conclusion that a single, common prerequisite of attractiveness shows through in all these examples: a rejection of
once-and-forever allotted form, freedom from ossification, the ability to
dynamically assume any form.
An ability that Id call plasmaticness, for here we have a being represented
in drawing, a being of definite form, a being which has attained a definite
appearance, and which behaves like the primal protoplasm, not yet possessing
a stable form, but capable of assuming any form and which, skipping along
the rungs of the evolutionary ladder, attaches itself to any and all forms of animal existence.
Why is the sight of this so attractive?
...
A lost changeability, fluidity, suddenness of formations thats the subtext
brought to the viewer who lacks all this by these seemingly strange traits which
permeate folktales, cartoons, the spineless circus performer and the seemingly
groundless scattering of extremities in Disneys drawings.
Its natural to expect that such a strong tendency of the transformation of stable forms into forms of mobility could not be confined solely to means of form:
this tendency exceeds the boundaries of form and extends to subject and theme.
An unstable character becomes a film hero; that is, the kind of character for
whom a changeable appearance is ... natural. Here, changeability of form is no
longer a paradoxical expressiveness, as in the case of stretching necks, tails and
legs: here, God Himself commanded the character to be fluid.
Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney1
4 Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord
Fluid Screens
Eisensteins admiration of Disneys animation was based largely on the
aesthetic appreciation of the malleability of the image an experience
he links to Lewis Carrolls Alice in Wonderland: Now I am opening out
like the largest telescope that ever was! He was fascinated by the scattering of extremities found in Disneys drawings a phenomenological
attractiveness that emerges, he wrote, from a fictitious freedom. For
an instant. A momentary, imaginary, comical liberation from the timelock mechanism of American life. A five-minute break for the psyche,
but during which the viewer himself remains chained to the winch of
the machine.2
Marshall McLuhan was always distrustful of the idea of flows as a
way of thinking about the spatial and temporal formations of electric
media. Like Eisenstein, McLuhan turned to Carroll to find the spatial
model for understanding the present space-time formation:
There is no longer any tendency to speak of electricity as contained in
anything. Painters have long known that objects are not contained in
space, but that they generate their own spaces. It was the dawning awareness of this in the mathematical world a century ago that enabled Lewis
Carroll, the Oxford mathematician, to contrive Alice in Wonderland, in
which times and spaces are neither uniform nor continuous, as they had
seemed to be since the arrival of Renaissance perspective. As for the speed
of light, that is merely the speed of total causality.3
The metaphor of flow is far too functionalist and reductive for McLuhan.
It reinforces a linear model of communication, a model of transfer rather
than one of translation, which for him preserved the complexity of all
human interaction. It is perhaps ironic that the theorist who made the
global village a globally understood metaphor worried that flow would
hearken back to a rationalist conception of linear space, a conception
which, as physics has shown, is an inaccurate understanding of electricity as a container and one-way movement. Thus McLuhan prefers the
painterly connotations of spatial terms like field or Carrolls construction (mathematically correct) of warped spaces. These impressed McLuhan precisely because they are discontinuous, not uniform, and reflect
the heterogeneity of the cultures of the world.
Zygmunt Bauman coined the term liquid modernity to characterize
the present moment in the history of modernity and capitalism. Liquid-
Introduction 5
ity and fluidity, he has argued, are the perfect metaphors for the new
flexibility of a space unfixed and time unbound. Fluids travel easily,
they spill, run out, splash, and so on. The central characteristic of
this new fluidity is time, since without the moment to mark it out, it
would be amorphous.4 In this way, Bauman avoids the problematic
characterization of a world made of indiscriminate flows, an image of
movement and ephemerality that can obscure real social and economic
conditions, frictions that force or hinder movement.5
Twenty years ago, communications theorists predicted that the
media were converging into one and that all information would be
transmitted through a singular medium a concern echoing the cultural theorists of the early part of the century. Yet at the beginning of
the twenty-first century, we can see that no one medium will dominate
the mediascape. The stories consumed in the industrialized democracies of the world are received through a multiplicity of hybrid and
networked screens, creating a fragmented reception that increasingly
characterizes our waking hours. As Henry Jenkins has pointed out,
convergence must be understood as a process that has several different
manifestations. Economic convergence highlights the fact that media
ownership is converging through horizontal integration of the cultural
industries. This is evidenced through the trans-media exploitation of
branded properties (e.g., Buffy, Harry Potter, Pokmon etc.) that is,
the increase in media tie-ins and synergies across the sphere of entertainment. Importantly, we need to consider convergence in terms of the
increased reality of media concentration and monopolies. Such media
concentration generally takes place across different media: the most
powerful corporations own multiple media and have strong alliances
with other industries. Thus, the concentration of ownership is also
enhanced by alliances between media groups and convergences of
interests. Media giants like Time Warner own interests in film, television, books, games, the Web, and music industries as well as real estate.
Clear Channel, a new player on the scene, owns 1,200 radio stations
across the United States and controls almost all large outdoor video
screens and myriad concert venues across North America. It is these
powerful media groups that have taken control of expanding media
and leisure markets, which include book publishing, music, online
media, theme parks, sports, and so forth. Such concentration of power
is the result of changes in national policy and law and will have profound effects on national cultures around the world which is why cultural policy is absolutely vital to our thinking about expanded cinema.
Jenkins also points to the social or organic aspect of convergence. This

refers to the social and cultural practices of consumption that can be
seen as active and open-ended. Children, for example, read books,
watch TV, listen to iPods, interact in chat rooms often all at the same
time. This organic convergence exists within a productive and creative
economy of media consumers who become in some sense bricoleurs of
their communal mediascapes. Cultural convergence grows out of social
convergence and is very much connected to do-it-yourself (DIY) cultures, the cultures of personal archiving, digital storytelling, creative
interactions, and new forms of political solidarity that are enabled by
digital media. Finally, global convergence is a manifestation of both social
and economic convergence, which is the result of new modes of production and distribution that are transnational world cultures (art,
music, film, dance, etc.) and new kinds of co-production and collaboration in the media industries and in translocal hybrid cultures.6
All of these aspects of convergence represent the tensions of globalization inside transnational contexts, creating a multiplicity of negotiations that are political, social, economic, cultural, and legal. Such
interactions are structured by the underlying antinomy fuelled by capitalist modernity that Walter Benjamin and T.W. Adorno were analysing in the 1930s: the tension between greater cultural diversity (witness
the recent strengthening of global grassroots politics) and cultural
homogenization (the concentration of multimedia ownership). Thus,
while the media are increasingly ubiquitous, the mediated global world
is also profoundly discontinuous and fragmented. For this reason, there
is a great urgency at this time to situate the fluid media in the context
of media histories, political economy, cultural practices and policy, new
articulations of identity and time, and media specificity. As unstable
and transitory as these media may be, it is vital to understand them
through a historical lens not in terms of simple chronologies but as part
of a larger media archaeology of contiguous and sometimes singular
practices and circumstances.7
Expanded Cinema
This book considers the shift from traditional cinematic spectacles to
works probing the frontiers of interactive, performative, and networked media. Drawing on a broad range of scholarship, including
film theory, communication studies, cultural studies, and new media
theory, the essays in this collection examine how digital technologies
Introduction 7
are transforming the semiotic fabric of contemporary visual cultures.

Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema begins with the phenomenon Gene
Youngblood described three decades ago as expanded cinema, that is,
an explosion of the frame outward towards immersive, interactive, and
interconnected forms of culture.8 Authors in this book have used the
word cinema to refer not simply to film as a technology but to a range
of moving-image technologies that are encompassed by the phenomenology of cinema. In his essay Cinema and the Code (2003), Youngblood defines cinema in the following way:
The subject of digital imaging, we agree, exists in the context of both
video and the computer (different only in the source of the image and in
the possibility of real time operation) and covers the generic areas of
image processing, image synthesis, and writing or organizing digital code
in a procedural or linguistic manner. But in every case when we refer to
the phenomenology of the moving image, we call it cinema. For us, it is
important to separate cinema from its medium, just as we separate music
from particular instruments. Cinema is the art of organizing a stream of
audiovisual events in time. It is an event-stream, like music. There are at
least four media through which we can practice cinema film, video,
holography and structured digital code just as there are many instruments through which we can practice music.9
Through his intellectual collaborations with artists Peter Weibel and

Steina and Woody Vasulka, Youngblood comes to a consideration that
distinguishes between different media of cinema and a unified view of
the multiplicity of image culture. We find these distinctions useful particularly as they encourage the cross-media and intermedial analysis
that we believe is imperative in the present context of hypermediation.
Youngbloods groundbreaking book Expanded Cinema offers us three
particular avenues from which to approach the immersive, interactive,
and interconnected field of digital screen culture: synesthesia, intermediality, and the global public. The intense utopianism of Youngbloods
era is embedded in every page of his book from the idea of the collective ownership of the earth and the cosmic consciousness of its citizens
to the idea that science teaches ethics to the final chapters assertion
that the open empire balancing nature and technology is all but upon
us. He begins the book with the explanation that expansion refers not to
computer films, video phosphors, atomic light or spherical projections
but to consciousness. This relation between mind and media is central
to this first extensive study and theorization of new media in terms of a

planetary global phenomenon. We must expand our horizons beyond
the point of infinity. We must move from oceanic consciousness to
cosmic consciousness.10 With expansion we cease to think about the
screen or the frame and we are instead in the place he describes as
intermedia, that is, an environment whose elements are suffused in
metamorphosis.11 The major influences in Youngbloods thinking include Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, artists such as Marcel
Duchamp and Carolee Schneeman, and scientists interviewed at IBM
and different laboratories around the world. The specific kinds of technologies, which were inseparable from the experiments he was looking
at, influenced his thinking about the expanded cinema, which included
various components of video and television (cathode-ray tubes, switching/mixing console, telecine projection, Chroma-Key video matting,
and various forms of broadcasting and narrowcasting, plasma crystal
displays, etc.), early computer technology and graphics systems,
holographic cinema, oscilloscopes, multiple projection environments,
as well as planetariums, sonar, and so forth. Youngbloods interest in
science was much deeper than indicated in this list of the specific technologies that comprise the expanded cinema environment. We
could say that art isnt truly contemporary until it relates to the world
of cybernetics, game theory, the DNA molecule, Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle, theories of antimatter, transistorization, the
breeder reactor, genocidal weaponry, the laser, pre-experiencing alternative futures.12 These ideas are very much at the heart of the present
collection.
Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema presents a multivalent view of the
place of digital media in the transformation of the public sphere its
expansions and contraction. These concerns form the animating context
for Gene Youngbloods Afterword in this volume, What We Must Do.
Written in 2003, Youngbloods manifesto-like text is a response to the
global demonstrations against the perpetual war in the Middle East:
The political demonstrations of 2003 were united in solidarity but were
separated in time. Historically they constituted a single event, a turning
point. They manifested the political will of a global community, but they
were not coordinated in time, and time is now the definitive feature of unification. Space has been dissolved; only time and timing circumscribe our
democratic right to peaceful assembly. The primary purpose of the event I
propose must be to make visible the invisible power that was behind the
political demonstrations. We need to match those spectacular images of
Introduction 9
assembly in space with equally powerful images of assembly in time
images of worldwide synchronization and coordination.
The imagination of an expanded global public sphere, not unlike what

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt have called the Multitude,13 is a
Utopian transnational network of social justice movements, artists, and
intellectuals. The liquidity of capital, the mobility of bodies, the connectivity of localities form a complexity that outstrips any single methodology, intellectual or political tradition, or medium. Youngbloods 1970
text and his 2003 manifesto inspire a set of transdisciplinary and transhistorical responses.
Using the experiments of the expanded cinema artists of the 1960s
and 1970s as a pivotal point in the archaeology of digital media culture,
we would be remiss not to mention Walter Benjamins and Siegfried
Kracauers early engagements with cinema as sensorium, as architecture, as street, and as a concretion of the flow of everyday life.
Cinema as the Flow of Life
Benjamins idea of the phantasmagoria and its reorganization of the
sensorium, and Kracauers idea of the mass ornament as an immersive
experience of modernitys technologies and spectacles, give us a historical view of the concerns in this book. Their writings of this period
(from the second decade of the twentieth century to the 1930s) also provide media theorists with a grammar for thinking about convergence as
a principle of fascism. Apposite to Benjamin and Kracauer, Germaine
Dulac and Jean Epstein were making arguments for cin-criture as a
type of synesthetic cinema. Informed by French aestheticism, Dulacs
interest in the synesthetic possibilities took the form of primitive sonograms: the writing of sound onto film. While her theorization of this
potentiality of cinema opened the formalism to a phenomenological
approach, neither she nor Epstein were especially interested in cinema
as sociocultural experience.14
The writings of Benjamin and Kracauer help to articulate the potentialities of another form and context of the moving image which the
institutional mode of representation displaces the heterogeneity of
temporal and spatial elements within which the moving image
appeared coeval with a sociocultural potentiality of a previously
unthinkable experience of democracy. With the emergence of the institutional mode of representation, this heterogeneity of contextually
derived experience is abstracted into film form. The context of viewing
10
Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord
is cleansed of its multidimensionality so that the eye is trained to look in

one direction only: the screen, which now folds into itself the illusion of
multiple views. However, that multiplicity of forms expanding from
movie screen to the hall and to the street, combined with Anne Friedbergs analysis of the mobile gaze of spectatorship15 (from screen to
street to shops), offers a rich prehistory to our contemporary moment of
immersion, intermediality, and mobility.
Both Benjamin and Kracauer see the cinema as a response to rather
than an expression of the alienated experiences of the industrialized
metropolis. They see the possibility for new kinds of association and
sociability, a possible reconfiguration of the subject. These decades held
a potential for a reconfiguration of the order of things instead of
greater abstraction and objectification, there was a promise of the
redemption of physical reality (Kracauer) in the politicization of art
(Benjamin). While this phenomenological strain appears consonant
with Maurice Merleau-Pontys philosophy of the perspectival eye being
embedded in the flesh of the world, Benjamins and Kracauers analyses
insist on the thoroughly permeated: the eye and the world are adjusted
by technology such that any phenomenal plentitude is experienced only
as mythic fragments. The unconscious optics of modernity are able to
perceive correspondences between myth and history since the continuity presented by each has been shattered into fragments. A whole field
of surprising correspondences between animate and inanimate nature
is opened up, wherein even things encounter us in the structures of frail
intersubjectivity.16 In the constellation, rebus, or hieroglyph of fragmented reality, the historical and the mythic, the technological and the
sentient, the remembered and the forgotten are apposite.
For these theorists, the potential appears because it is disappearing
a double vision of the lost and found. Benjamin and Kracauer wrote at
a time in which the spectatorial regime had recently been instituted: the
heterogeneity of space and time and the carnal density that had constituted the previous two decades of cinema experience were by the
1930s absorbed in the diegesis of the film. For both Benjamin and Kracauer though they articulate it differently this new scopic regime
signals a return of the aura and a further derealization of sentience
rather than its redemption. For in this dream of overcoming industrial
time, death is further extruded from temporality. Benjamin and Kracauer search for those elements which in this context of the renewed
aura break its spell: boredom, distraction, shock these aspects of collective experience within, rather than transcendent of, the capitalist
phantasmagoria mark a limit of the enframing of the world as image.
Introduction 11
Kracauer, like Benjamin, saw in the overlap of art, technology, and

everyday life before fascism especially in cinema and its reception a
possibility for experience to be productive of new social relations resistant to the petrification in ratio. And this possibility, he insists, involves
taking the uncharted path through the mass ornament, not away from
it, developing a critical phenomenology of the surface (as Thomas
Levin calls his method in the introduction to The Mass Ornament).17 Cinema, in Kracauers view, addresses its viewer as a material-corporeal
being; it seizes the human being with skin and hair;18 and, in doing
so, it holds a potential to shatter the illusion of the autotelic, insentient
subject and the capitalist ratio that produces this illusion as reality.
Benjamin and Kracauers work offers a means by which to think the
historical tension between the sensate, sexuate body and its dematerialization, its enframing by technological rationality. As we dwell in a
time of ever more ubiquitous and enchanting technologies, the project
of thinking this tension, while it may be aging, is not exhausted.
The possibility for thinking the temporal tensions between the body
and technology, not by avoiding the new technologies, but by critically
interrogating the enchantment and the irrationality underlying their
instrumental development, is of central concern in Kracauers essay
The Mass Ornament. And this process can only take place, as he
argues, by going directly through the center of the mass ornament, not
away from it. Kracauers early work, his phenomenology of the surface, rhymes with Benjamins in many ways, especially in his critique of
the re-enchantment of fragmented reality. As Susan Buck-Morss has
argued, with Benjamins final sentence of the Artwork essay (Communism responds by politicizing art), Benjamin is demanding of art a
task far more difficult [than making culture a vehicle for propaganda]
that is, to undo the alienation of the corporeal sensorium, to restore the
instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanitys selfpreservation, and to do this, not by avoiding the new technologies, but
by passing through them.19 This dual emphasis on the transformation of
perception and critique of social conditions found in Benjamin and Kracauer provides anchors for what writers like McLuhan and Youngblood have to tell us about televised cultural forms.
Canadian Media Studies
Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema develops a reflection on media forms
that is distinctly Canadian. McLuhans writings of the forties and fifties
especially, along with the writings of George Grant, Harold Innis, and
12
Eric Havelock, have helped to establish a Canadian intellectual tradition in cultural and communication studies. This tradition is characterized by a discourse on technology,20 a discourse that sees technology
as constitutive of social and psychic space.
McLuhans work is particularly relevant to the present volume. It
cannot be divorced from his immersion in the Catholic intellectual tradition, which includes Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. This is a tradition that in his interpretation prioritizes the poetic process and artists.
Poetry is the privileged art form, for contemporary poetry has healed
the breach between art and science.21 Language is the primary medium,
which he sees as a collective work of art because of its connection to oral
culture, to human speech, and to the temporal realm. For McLuhan, the
artist provides the source of great insight. Artists are the antennae of
the culture not because they are privileged humans or visionaries but
because artists take as their object human perception and cognition.
According to McLuhan everyone should use the methods of art to see
through the mediated environment and to understand the epistemological biases created by our technologies. Canadian intellectuals, he
argued, were especially well positioned to do this. As a former colony
of France and England, and because of our close proximity and distance
from the last empire, the United States, intellectuals working in Canada
have a unique perspective on the world. The countrys particular geography in relation to the United States has enabled it to keep an eye on
things and to function as an early warning system providing a model
for anticipating future events.22 Yet McLuhans media studies are
geared not so much towards the future (even though he has been called
a media prophet) as to the present moment. For McLuhan, the inhabitants of the Western world of literacy should approach things with a
keen sensory awareness and a desire (the Romantic dictum) to see
things as they really are through reflexive methodologies. This interest
in perception led McLuhan to interdisciplinary formulations, to an
interest in neurophilosophy before it was formulated as a field. One of
McLuhans contributions to communication studies is a conceptualization of space as produced, of time as living culture, and of culture as living time. He drew attention to the architectural space of the school in
the city and to the city as an educational space not simply filled with
rhetoric, but constructed by it. Theorists of space and architecture from
Henri Lefebvre to Edward Soja share this insight. McLuhan has focused
attention on the background and the spaces that both shape and are
shaped by everyday experiences.
Famously, McLuhan maintained that The Gutenberg Galaxy was a
Introduction
13
footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and

social consequences, first of writing and then of printing.23 He held
Harold Inniss scholarship in high esteem and did much to promote his
work. In the preface to Inniss Empire and Communications, McLuhan
writes:
If Hegel projected an historical pattern of figures minus existential
ground, Harold Innis, in the spirit of the new age of information, sought
for patterns in the very ground of history and existence. He saw media,
old and new, not as mere vortices at which to direct his point of view, but
as living vortices of power creating hidden environments that act abrasively and destructively on older forms of culture.24
It is the living vortices in Inniss research that no doubt influenced

McLuhans own thinking on how to conduct research into media
effects. Innis introduced a historical account that was richly nuanced
and grounded in place. Without an understanding of the aesthetic context from which such a methodology was born, Innis was using methods of collage and juxtaposition to create a landscape out of time and
historical facts. Innis presented a history of civilization by creating a
dynamic model that would present simultaneous events unfolding in
different parts of the world.
For McLuhan, the contemporary awareness of the electric age in
Baudelaires poetry or Czannes painting finds expression in the aesthetic forms of montage as seen in the newspaper or in the cinema. A
dynamic and open field of relationships replaces linear sequences of
words. McLuhan recognized the importance and originality of Inniss
insights and their appropriateness to the present context. Intertextual
layering is the pedagogical strategy that underlies all of Inniss later
writings and certainly all of McLuhans writings from the fifties onward:
Innis is not talking a private or specialist language but handing us the
keys to understanding technologies in their psychic and social operation
in any time or place.25
According to McLuhan, the radical historian of economics and communication discovered an essential method of using historical situations as a lab in which to test the character of technology in the shaping
of cultures. Like a scientist, Innis used the method known in chemistry
as the interface and in so doing presented a new world of economic
and cultural change by studying the interplay between mans artifacts
and the environments created by old and new technologies.26
McLuhan looked to anthropology for clues to comprehend electric
14
culture in terms of a new construction of space-time relations. He drew

upon a sound-based paradigm that was historically grounded and
directly inspired by oral cultural traditions. From here McLuhan would
find a vocabulary to describe the experience of the Electric Galaxy in
terms not of visual space but a new multidirectional Acoustic Space.
This idea of centre without margins, of a space with no fixed boundaries, is a means to describe a phenomenology of a new, imploded,
derealized space of the media, to describe an experience of living not
with the media but in and through mediation.
Electric Galaxies
The essays collected in this book draw upon a range of analytical and
critical frameworks that, while not exhaustive, enable the reader to
reflect upon the most pressing questions that face us today. The book is
structured by historically specific and overlapping areas of experience
that have arisen through the media since the 1930s. The new models
and metaphors that theorists from Benjamin to McLuhan to Gilles
Deleuze have used to address the changed status of the moving image
and concomitant transformations in screen technology are addressed
throughout the book. Collectively, the essays consider a series of questions that are both ontological and epistemological in nature: What
constitutes the new in new media? How are digital aesthetics different
from film aesthetics? What new forms of spectatorship and storytelling,
political community, and commodity production are being enabled
through the digital media?
The overall problematic for this collection is framed by an understanding of the digital not simply as a technology but also as an experience of space and time tied to capitalism. One of the ways in which we
are distinguishing between the different media that constitute
expanded cinema is through an emphasis on the supports that hold
images together and define their shapes. Thus the book is divided into
three parts. Part I, Expanding Cinema Immersion, is concerned with
spatial narratives and immersive technologies. Focusing on projects
from the Labyrinth Pavilion at Expo 67, 1960s sound experiments,
IMAX and QuickTime screens as well as Web narratives, new editing
tools and immersive caves, the essays in this first section are more formal in their approach to analysing the new (and old) phenomenology
of expanding screens. Part II, Digital Time Archive, takes as its focus
the act of making time and the new forms of temporality enabled by
Introduction
15
digital technologies: feminist and activist media projects, new forms of

collective memory and history, along with a new politics of time.
Across different essays, the archive as a way of storing and collecting
time is engaged as a tool for building communities and shared histories in a manner that is dynamic and open. The final section of the book,
Part III, Liquid Space Mobility, looks at new kinds of movement and
economic liquidity in the digital realm, from war games, labour practices, cell phone projects to different kinds of social intervention and a
manifesto for the digital artwork.
The first essay in Fluid Screens explores the emergence of a new
medium presented at Expo 67 called synesthetic cinema. This new
form, according to Marchessault, promised a multisensory experience
that would unify the senses and the different cultures of the world.
With a specific focus on the multi-screen presentation Labyrinthe, which
was designed by the National Film Board of Canadas Unit B directors
for Expo 67, the essay addresses the new visibility of expanded screens
in the cinema of the 1960s in terms of an experience of simultaneity. We
find at Montreals Expo a precursor to some of the most utopian tenets
of digital culture. Following the research that went into The Labyrinth
Project, Marchessault turns to the writing of Wallace Stevens to understand the relationship between the screen and architecture as one that
takes place at the intersection of the flow of time and the fixity of
space. This was for Stevens the definition of artistic practice and for the
directors of Labyrinthe a state of being that may create universal understanding.
For his part, and in a manner that is equally concerned with phenomenology and the screen as an immersive environment, Stephen Crocker
adds sound and a concomitant awareness of multiplicity to his reading
of new digital environments. He combines the thoughts of Glenn
Gould and McLuhan to contemplate the concept of the singular and the
multiple that has come to define the paradox of the global village. In
exploring the multiplicity of media environments as an experience of
the digital, Crocker turns to the sound experiments of the 1960s and in
particular to the underexamined writings and radio works of Glenn
Gould and sound artists like John Cage and Rolf Lieberman. For
Crocker it is the immersive and multidirectional qualities of sound that
provide a key to understanding the global village. For media artists and
theorists of the 1960s, sound was interesting for what it revealed not
about a source, but about the organizational structure of sensation.
Haidee Wasson argues that cinema scholars must expand their ana-
16
lytical frame to take account of the cinema in terms of its connections to

a diversity of merchandising sites, product placements, and tie-ins. We
can no longer think of mainstream films as simple screens but as a
series of interconnected events nodes of complex networks where a
movie is never just a film. Her analysis of the networked screen leads
her to consider two instances in the expanded viewing context: QuickTime streams and IMAX. In her discussion of QuickTime, Wasson
argues that a new way of looking is initiated that involves temporal
networks that exceed the streamed image. The proliferating screen both
contracts and expands. While IMAX stands in opposition to the experience of the small computer screen, it is also a networked screen because
IMAX is always about IMAXs network of technologies, screens, and
institutions. Both small and large screens present examples of the networked screen that underpins the often invisible materiality and multiplicity of contemporary visual culture.
In her essay The Iterative Circle: Transformation of Web Narrative
in Amika, Sheila Petty explores artistic networks when she examines a
collaboration between African and Canadian Web artists in the creation
of a series of Web-based narratives made possible through Dakar Web.
Although the problem of access to the Web and to digital technologies
continues to be a pressing issue African teledensity remains below
one line per one hundred people she is encouraged by some of the
new networks that are being created among artists communities in and
outside Africa. Petty challenges the idea that Western cultural standards will simply inevitably and monolithically overwhelm culturally
located forms of production in collaborative situations. Through a
detailed reading of the Senegalese Web-based narrative Amika (Ndary
L, Massamba Mbaye, Moussa Tine, and Madick Seck, 1999), Petty
examines the use of new technology in non-Western cultures in terms
of traditions of local transformation of communications technology.
The now well-known example of the sub-Saharan cinema of the late
1950s and early 1960s that led to the creation of a specific cinema aesthetic based in concepts of orality and social space can also be seen similarly in the Web-based fiction Amika. This complex Web fiction driven
by a rhetorical structure ... relies on an African sense of time and space
in which absence becomes a means of engendering debate. The cultural specificity of the Web-based narratives that Petty examines draw
upon African oral traditions to create distinct hybrid forms that extend
longstanding artistic traditions. Amika presents a spatial narrative that
is cosmological and interwoven like a piece of cloth. The narrative
Introduction
17
combines both African oral traditions with the interlacing capability of

the Web technology to reflect upon a unique worldsense of interacting
forces. The narrative encompasses an open-endedness and a plurality
of trajectories to draw out a distinctly African pattern. While this collective project is a work of fiction, it describes the lived realities of the poor
in a way that is comprehensible to those living outside its worlds.
The celebrated filmmaker and writer Abigail Child extends the
examination of creative practice through her journal that documents
uses of digital technology in editing. Her work begs some questions of
creative engagement with media Why is the digital seductive for artists? What might be its impact on how we understand and make historical images? Child works with a stream-of-consciousness form of
writing (not unlike her films) to contemplate simultaneity and the
physical experience of editing. She recalls the Steenbeck, early television and video editing, and the exhaustion of ten-hour days. From
these recollections, Child cuts back to the work at hand, the creation of
an interactive website and the questions that arise around these new
technologies: the meaning of interactivity, interface, and weaving.
Childs essay provides rich reflections and poetic ruminations on the
history of editing and specifically on the shift from film to three-quarter-inch video to digital video. Across a thirty-year span, the artist presents a rare view of media history and of the process of artmaking in the
digital age.
Like Child, Ron Burnetts contribution offers speculations and
insights into the meanings of digital technology: do we need a new
language and new metaphors to describe these new technologies?
Although he proposes a new metaphor for studying digital media and
theorizing digital aesthetics, he cautions that what must be maintained
is a materialist approach to media analysis. That is, it is important to
create a history of immersive art forms: It is only when the history of
images their evolution and aesthetic patterns are firmly situated in
the context of new media that we may be able to argue persuasively for
some of the transformative shifts that digital technologies are engendering. Burnett questions the paradigms and vocabularies that are currently being called upon to describe new media. He objects to terms
like user and he asserts that a great deal more research needs to take
place in the realm of interactivity, perception, and physical sensation
before we will understand how the digital has transformed the spectator. Finally, he proposes a new term that combines the word image with
photograph imograph. The term foregrounds the plasticity of new
18
images and Burnett concludes his essay, and Part I of Fluid Screens, by
offering examples of screenless contexts for the consumption of digital
images and narratives.
Historical memory is often full of traps, such as nostalgia for
moments of political engagement, solidarity, and community building,
for this nostalgia erases as much as it preserves. These concerns with
the complexity of digital time comprise Part II of this volume. The technological ability to preserve pasts and upload them toward a future
has, according to Caitlin Fisher, met with essentialism, and its attendant
binaries, in certain versions of cyber-feminism. As she notes, it is
impossible to ignore the fact that many of these hypertexts are produced by white women. Fisher cites Blair and Takayoshi, who remind
us that the Web is yet another cultural site where users are bombarded
with representations of women based more on an essentialist definition
of woman than the lives of real women from varying cultural backgrounds. Fishers article interrogates this reification of past practices,
with its repositing of core images of the (white) female body, its Webbased forms of consciousness-raising groups (with its homogeneous
membership), and its deployment of metaphors of home, weaving, and
other female practices. She wonders whether this is a reflection of the
larger retro-culture or if it is about searching through the archive for a
means both to put to rest the homogeneity of its culture and to rescue
those elements of a past that has yet to be realized for a generation of
young women who are finding old political problems to be far from
over. Is there a way to perform an immanent critique or to see these
hypertextual experiments as generative texts? What might this kind of
monstrous reading practice reveal? Perhaps revisiting 1970s aesthetics,
themes, and preoccupations in this new context might be productive
for feminisms. Rather than dismiss these formulations as old, essentialist, or naive, what productive tensions and pathways might we discover in them?
Rinaldo Walcotts reading of the film The Last Angel of History by the
black British filmmaker John Akomfrah considers the way in which the
digital has provided the means of archiving black music, making it
available not just for global markets but for artists who then cut and
mix the history in a reflection of diasporic homelessness a downloadable Africa. He posits a critique of the assumption that black people
have been more alienated than others from technology, situating black
history in the history of modernity and modernism, and within the
terms of the aesthetic project of futurism. For Akomfrah, and for Wal-
Introduction
19
cott, the cybernetic does not appear as an external spectacle but as a

component of sound; and Akomfrahs Data Thief is an embodiment of
transnational communicative practice and what Greg Tate calls digitized race memory. Walcott argues that memory is politicized in the act
of rememory: In the case of black diaspora musics in the cybernetic
age, digitized race memory allows for a musical memory which can
mediate between musics of the past and musics of the present-future in
ways that continually return to important moments of cultural sharing,
renewal and other unknown possibilities.
Like Walcott, Michael Uwemedimo and Joshua Oppenheimer see
memory in the digital age in terms of a dynamic knowledge network
and collective process of excavation. Their essay History and Histrionics: Vision Machines Digital Poetics describes a collective project to
recover the lost histories of the Indonesian genocide. The project is not
simply one of uncovering something that was lost but of bringing
to light the very power structures that make people forget. Vision
Machine, a media-based research project and collective, has created a
methodology that is deeply imbricated in the social realities and historical traces of the mass murders. Their methodology involves using digital media to create an archive of recollections, actions, and historical
artifacts through archeological performances. This involves a layering
of temporalities, affects, and interpretations (asking soldiers to re-enact
killings, getting people to respond to the performance): Between a
buried historical event, and its restaging with historical actors, this
method opens a process of simultaneous historical excavation (working down through the strata), and histrionic reconstruction (adding
layers of stylized performance and recounting). It is this process that
creates a sense of shared time and a network of collaborators. The
project itself finds support in digital media networks and the Internet
that help collectives of producers and activists to distribute and share
their work.
In her essay From Sequence to Stream: Historiography and Media
Art, Susan Lord explores the relationship between the historiographic
imaginary of media artists working in the past quarter-century by looking at digital archives and databases in the context of globalization and
the political affinities forged under these conditions. She says The shift
from politics as a project connected to Left history, anchored to class
analysis and struggle, to politics as subaltern emergence, affiliated with
decolonization struggles, has found artists of commitment operating
with very different tools, vocabularies, and ontologies. The difference
20
between Emile de Antonio and Walid Raad is perhaps the most extreme
comparison of that which can be found between Sara Diamonds work
of the 1980s and Vision Machines project in development since 2000:
the ontological status of the archive, its truth-yielding potential, has
become unusable for the production of counter-truths. In other words,
this is not merely about timelines of capital or about the ruined index,
it is also about new movements of time and uses of technology that
take place with liquid modernity: the infinite multiplication of
truth claims and their correlative commodification create a condition
in which the interested artist (one concerned with, for example, the
Lebanese wars, Iran-Contras effects, Indonesian genocides, guest
workers, a thirty-four-year civil war in Guatemala) is now forced to
relinquish the future of truth (and, hence, justice) that the interrogated,
critically montaged archive had promised. Yet it is the way in which
political collectives are acting to build archives and use databases that
represents new models for thinking about how history is written.
Glenn Willmotts essay concludes Part II of this book by problematizing the very idea of digital time as deep media, something that is
beneath the surface, that structures all of our interactions. While he
acknowledges that digital technology has transformed the world, he is
also cautious about overstating the case in a manner that is romantic
McLuhans global village was perhaps the first romance of the digital
world and for him this romance has produced its tragedies. Willmott
analyses the infamous case of Mr Bungle, who raped and tortured users
in LambdaMOO in 1993. Mr Bungle, he tells us, was not simply an
aberration; he was a product of VR. Like the interactive artwork by Graham Harwood, A Rehearsal of Memory, which creates a patchwork of
inmates memories and tattoos at the Ashworth Mental Hospital in Liverpool, these tragedies reveal a great deal about the status of bodies in
the context of the so-called dematerialization brought about by the digital revolution. For Willmott, the digital suffers from an institutionally
bounded form of alienation. Chris Markers Level Five and Daniel
David Mosess Kyotopolis offer insights into the relations of time and
value produced in the digital world the tragedy of the utopian and the
terrible.
Games are a global industry that now exceeds Hollywood in terms of
box office revenues. War games are particularly popular and often push
the boundaries between virtual and actual in disturbing ways. Nick
Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter open Part III of the book by examining the historical relationship between military simulation and digi-
Introduction
21
tal play, focusing on the game Full Spectrum Warrior a game designed
for the U.S. Army as a military training tool and for the public as popular entertainment. There are currently some forty games that are custom built for military purposes and popular consumption. What does
this mean for the future of war and entertainment? According to the
authors, FSW contributes to [the] banalization of war by promoting
uncritical identification with imperial troops; by clichd celebration of
the virtue of their cause and the justice of their activities; by routinizing
the extermination of the enemy; by diminishing the horrors of battle,
and exalting its spectacle. Like Willmott, they are concerned with the
way that actual bodies are being iterated through these new games.
John McCullough also looks to understand the changed context of
physical labour in his analysis of the Canadian film and television
industry. McCulloughs starting point is a crisis created by the overdeveloped animation sector of the volatile global film market. Within
this context, his analysis of the Canadian patterns of production in relation to global markets provides important insights into the status of
independent and national media and the labour that makes it possible.
In conjunction with Canadas status in the global image market,
McCullough looks at the way the digital has shifted relations of media
work in the industry. Although a great deal of talk around the digital
emphasizes the rise of independent media, little attention has been
paid to the increasing atomization of work, labours largely specialized, dispersed and freelance status ... negotiated in an increasingly
unregulated and competitive manner in the image and labour marketplace. This means that workers are often overpowered by ownership,
experiencing a loss of the workforce. Sadly, Canadas situation is that
it is tied to Tinseltown, and the phrase coined by Canadian film historian Peter Morris many years ago to describe the film industry, embattled shadows, still holds strong.
Kirsty Robertsons essay introduces mobility into the discussion of
digital culture by considering localized screenless technology par excellence, the mobile or cell phone. Cell phones are the tools of a new, constantly connected, social. Like all of the authors in Fluid Screens,
Robertson is concerned with the materiality of digital environments.
She looks to the actions of Jon Agar, who takes a hammer to his cell
phone in order to foreground the hardware and trace each of its miniature components to different parts of the world. This dissection reveals
a global economy of power and domination at work in the tiny handheld device. Like McCullough, Robertson understands the digital in
22
dialectical terms, both as profiteering and revolutionizing. She is concerned with the new kinds of sociality introduced by cell phones in
urban and developing spaces ring tones and private conversations are
reconfiguring the public realm and the transit systems. The cell phone
and text messaging have also redefined the tactical strategies for activism and protest, political mobilization, and global movement across the
world. The new capabilities of cell phone photography, video, or of
cells adapted to soft fabrics point towards new extensions of the social
circumstances created by mobile communication devices.
Writing from Lebanon, Laura U. Marks raises the question of how to
create embodied images and experiences in an age of hypermediation.
Using the work of Henri Bergson and Charles Sanders Peirce, Marks
considers perceptual paradigms for multisensory experiences. These
paradigms came into being at the very moment when capitalist modernity began the process of creating the informatic world. Through this
lens, Marks sketches out the relationship between experience and perception in the information age. While the current era has produced
information environments that are not conducive to diversely embodied experiences, activists must take back the flow to reintroduce and
reawaken new forms of thought and creativity. Her hope lies with
immigrant people, whose marginal positions within corporate and
state power structures may change the flow of information-rich
places: It is the very people who are missing, citizens of nowhere, for
whom independent perception and thought are not a luxury but a
necessity. Through subterranean communication networks, these citizens may create a new ground for thinking through the media.
Like Marks, Sean Cubitt presents tactical strategies for intervening in
global flows. His essay is concerned with the possibilities offered by the
digital artwork. He begins with the landmark essay by Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator. Viewing the differences between
analogue and digital as one would different languages, Cubitt explains
that the nature of the digital must be situated in terms of the universes
created by distinct languages. His essay is a manifesto for the engaged
digital artwork. Inspired by the anti-commodity aesthetics of 1970s
conceptual art, the digital artwork will need to move beyond the negative aesthetics of the historical avant garde. The committed artwork
will need to be fully engaged in the flow in order to intervene in it.
Artworks must be process-oriented, self-reflexive in a way that understands their own materiality, temporality (as connected to and responsible for the future), and positionality in terms of networks of
Introduction
23
flows. The global must be understood as a determining force. The artwork is engaged in work. It engages the audience in its own creation in
a way that redefines interaction towards a more fully articulated participation. Finally the digital artwork must be beautiful (rather than sublime) that is, historically grounded, concerned with communication
rather than representation. Bringing together many of the points raised
throughout this book and indeed directing us towards many artworks
that display his precepts, Cubitts essay is a forceful and convincing
description of politically committed digital aesthetics.
Finally, the book concludes with a utopian and imperative Afterword
by Gene Youngblood, whose ideas and insights have shaped the conceptual framework for this book. Youngbloods essay is a call for the
creation of a global democratic public sphere. As noted earlier, he
directs our attention to a virtual power that is invisible and often overlooked: the uncontrolled conversation among the peoples of the world
made possible through the Internet. Talk, by which he means all
modes of human expression including audio-visual, is the most powerful of human actions because it enables humans to construct shared
realities. Witness that image of solidarity on 15 February 2003, when
more than ten million people took to the streets around the world to
protest neoliberal globalization and U.S. imperialism. This was a manifestation of the power of talk, the power that leads to action. But while
such actions were coordinated across spaces, they were not synchronized across time zones. Youngblood calls upon artists and activists to
organize an event, a gesamptkunstwerk that would consolidate a global
public sphere. This would be a series of daily outdoor performances in
a continuous unbroken sequence over weeks and months that are telecollaborative multimedia performances and multimedia teleconferences. While Youngbloods proposal is admittedly utopian, it leaves us
with a sense of possibility and a question: why has this not been
attempted?
NOTES
1 Sergei Eisenstein, Eisenstein on Disney (London: Methuen, 1988), 212.
2 Ibid., 11, 223.
3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ed. W.
Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003), 348.
4 Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 2, 1011.
24
5 For critiques of globalization as cultural flow, see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing,

Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), and Michael Peter Smith, Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization (Malden, UK: Blackwell, 2001).
6 Henry Jenkins, Convergence? I Diverge, Technology Review (June 2001): 93.
7 Thomas Elsaesser, The New Film History as Media Archeology, Cinmas
14, nos. 23 (2004): 75117.
8 Gene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema (New York: Dutton, 1970).
9 Gene Youngblood, Cinema and the Code, in Future Cinema: The Cinematic
Imaginary after Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003), 15661.
10 Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 136.
11 Ibid., 347.
12 Ibid., 135.
13 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age
of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004).
14 See Germaine Dulac, The Essence of the Cinema: The Visual Idea (1925), in
The Avant-Garde Reader: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney
(New York: New York University Press, 1978), 3642, for a discussion of the
affective potential of cinema.
15 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993). At this writing, Friedbergs muchanticipated book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft is due to be
published by MIT Press.
16 Jurgen Habermas, Consciousness Raising or Redemptive Criticism: The
Contemporaneity of Walter Benjamin, New German Critique 17 (spring
1979): 46.
17 See Thomas Y. Levins Introduction to the collection of Kracauers early
essays, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. and trans. Levin (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 20.
18 Cited in Miriam Hansens analysis of Kracauers 1940 Marseille notebooks, With Skin and Hair: Kracauers Theory of Film, Marseille 1940,
Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 43769. These notebooks (as yet unpublished), Hansen contends, are the first draft of Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality written two decades later. They provide a link
between his pre-war, pre-exile writings (some of which have recently been
translated and published in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays), which
deal with film and mass culture from a critical and historical-philosophical
perspective, and the 1960 book, which is concerned with more formalist
matters.
Introduction
25
19 Susan Buck-Morss, Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamins Artwork Essay Reconsidered, October 62 (1992): 5.
20 Arthur Kroker, Technology and the Canadian Mind: Innis/McLuhan/Grant
(Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1984).
21 Marshall McLuhan, Catholic Humanism and Modern Letters, in Christian
Humanism in Letters: The McAuley Lectures, Series 2 (West Hartford, CT: St
Joseph College, 1954), 78.
22 McLuhan, Understanding Media, viixi.
23 Harold Innis, The Bias of Communication (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1991), ix.
24 Ibid., vi.
25 Ibid., vii.
26 Marshall McLuhan, Canada: The Borderline Case, in The Canadian Imagination: Dimensions of a Literary Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1977), 222.
PART I
Expanding Cinema Immersion
In this first section, spatial narratives and screen technologies are

inflected with an acoustic aesthetic that is inspired by the simultaneous
and ephemeral experience of the digital. The essays explore the implications of the shift from film to digital media: the precursor to this shift
in the films and sound experiments of the 1960s and 1970s; the need to
consider what is beyond the screen in the context of proliferating products; the new narratives and experiments that have arisen out of networked and Web-based works; the experience of manipulating images
and experiments with immersive environments. All six of the essays in
Part I bring a nuanced, phenomenological reading to the formal supports and experience of cinemas expanding architectures.
1 Multi-Screens and Future Cinema:

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67
jan i n e m a rch e ssau lt
Media histories are located across a variety of artistic and industrial

practices, institutions, and technologies. One aspect of this includes the
history of an attitude towards the media, and more specifically towards
what makes them new and meaningful. As both Marshall McLuhan
and Raymond Williams have shown us, the evolution of media forms
does not arise suddenly out of nowhere but is connected to a social, economic, and cultural network of conditions, grammars, and contiguities
that support their development.1 World expositions are places where
new expectations and attitudes towards future technology are stimulated. This is no doubt what makes them such useful historical markers
of cultural value. Consider Expo 67, which was held in Montreal to celebrate Canadas centenary. Second only to Pariss Exposition Universelle of 1900, it was one of the most successful world fairs ever held,
with attendance at just over fifty million.2 Although it may be true that
all world expositions are training grounds for commodity consumption
in ways that raise spectatorship to a civic duty,3 what distinguished
Expo 67 from all other previous world expositions was its spectacular
showcasing of audio-visual technologies. Over three thousand films
were produced for the event, several film festivals were connected to it,
including a large Montreal Film Festival and a student film festival.
Approximately 65 per cent of all the pavilions and complexes presented
moving pictures, many of which were dazzling displays of the new
flexibility of the screen and the new synesthesia of the visual cultures of
the world mediated through technology.4
This event can be read as an important precursor to the multiplication and interconnectedness of screens that characterize twenty-firstcentury digital architectures. While Bazin predicted that the myth of
30
Janine Marchessault
total cinema would lead to the disappearance of the screen (i.e., holographic cinema),5 the contemporary context presents just the opposite:
frames within frames that foreground the materiality of the screen. In
this essay, I focus on one of the most complex of the multi-screen pavilions at Expo: Labyrinthe. The exhibition was designed by Colin Low
with Roman Kroitor, who were both established documentary film
directors from the Unit B at the National Film Board of Canada (NFB).
The Labyrinth Project proposed an audio-visual experience that they
believed could well transform the future of cinema by creating a new
medium. My account does not seek to establish a pre-history of digital
cinema but rather to point to this experiment, one of thousands tied to
the experimental media cultures of the sixties, to illustrate an increasing
desire on the part of artists to create entirely new architectures for sensory immersion that would expand the experience of film.6 I would like
to draw attention to a particular attitude underlying the NFBs Labyrinthe. This was an attitude that was at once utopian and pragmatic,
combining a profound awareness of the world as organic interconnectivity and simultaneity as communicative possibility.
Expo as Earth City
I was a young child when I attended Expo 67, and my memories of it
are vague. Yet childhood memories, unreliable as they may be, often
preserve lasting impressions of a time. Two themes dominate my recollection. The first is distinguished by an awareness of the materiality of
the earth as a liquid planet the image of the space-age mirrored in
the designed environment of soft edges and orbed surfaces. The second
was a notion that television would serve as a means of corporeal transportation. This idea might well have been reinforced by Star Trek, which
featured a transponder that seemed made of cathode ray beams,
which was of course a wonderful (and ironic) encapsulation of the electromagnetic waves that made TV transmission possible. All across
North America, primary schools added special features to curricula,
inspired on the one hand by Expo and on the other by the promise of
space travel.7 In a peculiar fashion, the two projects were synonymous.
Both shared the humanistic guise of Man and His World, the theme of
Expo 67, and both concerned the future planet and technology. Growing up in Montreal, I can recall more than one school project geared
towards imagining the future of the planet as a utopian city (one of
McLuhans early formulations was the planet as city)8: a fluid and
The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67 31
boundless world that operated off the ground. This is the context in
which I would like to analyse one of the most successful multi-screen,
multi-chamber film experiments at Expo 67.
Organized by the NFB for Expo, Labyrinthe was precisely the kind of
future cinema earth city project that a collective fantasy was conjuring
in the popular culture of the sixties. One of the expressive metaphors for
this fantasy of modernity was an excess of screens, and Expo 67 was
filled with them. As Judith Shatnoffs review in Film Quarterly described, film came on two screens, on three, five, six, nine in a circle, 112
moving screen cubes, a 70mm frame broken into innumerable screen
shapes, screens mirrored to infinity, a water screen, a dome screen.9
And new names were being invented to describe these screens: Circle
Vision, Polyvision, Kino-Automat, Diapolyecran, and Kaleidoscope.
While the Moscow Worlds Fair featured Glimpses of the USA, a projection on seven screens by Charles Earnes in 1959 (which upstaged The
Family of Man photographic exhibition curated by Edward Steichen),
and while the New York Worlds Fair (1964) had dozens of multi-screen
projections, including Glimpses of the USA on fourteen screens at the
IBM pavilion,10 there was nothing that matched Expo in terms of sheer
quantity of international and experimental films.11
As a future-tense city, Expo was said to be itself a cinematic city, filled
with structures made of webs and screens that refracted and reflected
other images, bodies in movement, and atmospheric variations. Indeed,
the master plan design intent, whose chief architect was Edouard Fiset,
recommended that designers and architects explore the new possibilities of webs and film-like materials. Expo was called the Space-Frame
Fair because so many pavilions covered large areas with lightweight
materials creating structures that were demountable and ready for
transportation. It is the immaterial, the impermanent, the non-linear, the
ephemeral of Expo that gave it its modern futuristic sheen, mirroring
the new, dematerialized commodity culture of North America.12 Thus it
was not the monumentality of a disposable imperial city, expressing
mans dominance over the earth,13 that we find at Expo 67 but the flexibility of the city in movement. Not surprising, transportation and the
orchestration of traffic were the key components of the entire plan, with
trains uniting vast areas of the complex site. The trains were themselves
a complicated network of movements and connections, organized
according to different speeds, operating at different heights while offering riders a variety of vistas.14 Expos one thousand acres with two manmade islands built on the St Lawrence River (le Notre-Dame and le
32
Janine Marchessault
Sainte-Hlne) offered something unique in the way of urban design: a

utopian non-place that combined a unified system of signs with a highly
diverse visual culture representing a new sense of globality. Expo was
built to reflect certain trends in international art and architecture of the
sixties. These trends towards openness to the present and connection to
the world as a diversity of perspectives encompassed central themes of
hybridity and multiplicity.
The three-chamber installation that made up Labyrinthe was designed
by Colin Low and built by the architectural firm of John Bland, Roy E.
Lemoyne, Gordon Edwards, and Anthony Shine, with Harry Vandelman as the project supervisor. Inspired by McLuhans anthropological
writings on the media as well as Northrop Fryes theories of archetypes,
the installation served to highlight a new awareness of simultaneity and
new concepts of space-time created through media technologies. McLuhans intellectual collaborations with the British-born urban planner
Jacqueline Tyrwhitt, who taught urban design and landscape architecture at the University of Toronto up until the mid-fifties, might shed
some light on this new context of architecture in the sixties. Tyrwhitt
was the editor of the journal Ekistics and translator and editor of many
of Siegfried Gideons writings an important influence on McLuhans
media theories. We can see in Understanding Media (1964) precisely this
influence on his views of the media as architectonic, environmental, and
process-oriented fields rather than as simply virtual or static containers.
A member of the Toronto Explorations Group in the early fifties, Tyrwhitt was also connected to architects in Montreal, not least the firm that
employed Moshe Safdie, the designer of Habitat the ultimate encapsulation of Expos humanist intent. What grows out of the exchanges
between urban and media theory with the Explorations team, a research
group connected to an international interdisciplinary enterprise, is an
anthropological approach to the built environment and an understanding that communications media as extensions of the human body produce environments that carry their own hidden biases.15
McLuhans research aimed to uncover media biases through the creation of anti-environments, which the successful work of art could produce. His critical pedagogy maintained that the meeting of new and old
technologies could generate new forms of awareness. He does not separate different media but rather seeks to understand them in terms of
whole networks of obsolescences, absorptions, and hybrid energies. All
media come in pairs, with one acting as the content of the other.16 The
usefulness of the electric light as an example of a medium (one that Eco
objected to) stems from its lack of content. Students of media can
observe the way they transform the structures of time and space, work
and society. They will come to understand the form of power that is in
all media to reshape any lives they touch.17 All other media are hybrid;
they are the result of a meeting which produces a moment of freedom
and release from the ordinary trance and numbness imposed by them
on our senses. The interface between two different media has characterized the undertakings of the best artists: Dickens, Shaw, Eliot, Joyce,
Eisenstein, the Marx Brothers, Chaplin, and many more, who were able
to produce new forms of entertainment and art. It often takes a great
artist to anticipate the hybrid created by the clash of cultures, which
often occurs during wars and migrations.18 This idea of the interface
between old and new technologies was central to the new synesthetic
cinema that was pioneered at Expo and later theorized by Gene Youngblood in his landmark study, very much inspired by Expo 67, Expanded
Cinema (1970).
Mind-Expanding Screens
The relation between screen and architecture, the screen as architecture, was endemic to the humanist design of Expo. Whereas classical
depictions of dehumanization staged the cinema screen as precisely
that which alienates humans from the social fabric of everyday life
Fritz Langs Metropolis (1922) is a great example of this idea Expos
image of the screen, as we shall see, was just the opposite. R. Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome was an important milestone for those
multi-screen experimenters at Expo, wrote the wonderful introduction
to Youngbloods book. Fullers planetary vision of an earth space
challenged the view of the earth that portioned it into tiny static cubes
of property, an idea based on a two-dimensional picture of the world
that did not include the space above the ground, that is, the universe.
Instead, Fuller counterposes Einsteins larger view of a non-linear universe, a complex of frequencies, waves, broadcasts, and instantaneous
communication within the context of the universe. For Fuller, Youngbloods book is important because it uses the scenario-universe principle: a scenario of non-simultaneous and only partially overlapping
transformative events. Youngbloods theorization of synesthetic art is
most valuable for its educational potential: it will synchronize the
senses and humankinds knowledge in time to ensure the continuance
of the ... Space Vehicle Earth.19 The new ecological art forms will lead
34
Janine Marchessault
to the Expanded Cinema University, that is, to universal knowledge.

Just as his geodesic dome was designed for mobility, as a ball in movement, so too was the synesthetic cinema designed for process-oriented
experiences.
The notion that film technology could create a new awareness and an
expanded consciousness for the new age of simultaneity was repeated
frequently at Expo. The cover story of the 14 July issue of Life was called
A Film Revolution to Blitz Mans Mind, a revolution that showed us
the future: Londons Crystal Palace in 1851 did this with iron and
glass architecture, the Paris 1889 fair with steam engineering, the 1904
St. Louis Fair with the auto. Expo 67 does it with film and, through
images that assault the senses and expand the mind, explodes the
world into a revolution in communications.20 Expo offered a variety of
new forms of participatory multi-screen cinema (fig. 1.1). Canada 67, a
part of the Telephone Pavilion, was among the most spectacular and
nationalistic with a film made by Walt Disney Studios. Using a ninecamera apparatus to create a 3608 circle vision screen, the spectacle
enveloped 1,500 viewers at a time. The twenty-two-minute film began
on the east coast with the Canadian Mounted Police, moving to Quebecs Winter Carnival to a Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game to the
wild west and Canadas national parks. For Robert Fulford all of the
multi-screen presentations were disappointing, but Canada 67 was
among the most blatant in its chauvinism.21 CPR Cominco Pavilions
We Are Young by filmmakers Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid, who also made To Be Alive for the 1964 Worlds Fair, used six
screens to devise a documentary about the trials and tribulations of
being a teenager. Polar Life by Graham Ferguson displayed eleven
screens with two or three visible at a time as viewers sat in four revolving theatres on one large turntable. Perhaps the most theatrical of the
presentations was the Kino-Automat (movie vending) on three screens,
devised by cinematographer Raduz Cincera, which incorporated live
theatre at the Czechoslovakian pavilion. Audience members had a red
and a green button in front of them and were invited to vote on the
actions to be taken by characters in the film. A live performer from the
film would emerge at different points to ask the audience to vote. The
voting itself was a ruse, and although each interval did allow for two
choices, all paths ended in the same place. For Cincera, this illusion of
interactivity was to be a comedy, a comment on democracy.22
Writing under the influence of both McLuhan and Fuller as well as all
of the multi-screen experiments at Expo and the emerging field of
experimental media art, Youngblood posits synesthetic cinema as a

new revolutionary form. This is the age of cosmic consciousness, in
which intuition and reason are joined once more.23 Youngblood theorizes that it is the cinemas role to approximate consciousness, which he
defines according to R.G. Collingwoods specification as the kind of
thought which stands closest to sensation or mere feeling. All thought
grows out of this and deals with feeling as thus transformed into imagination.24 Consciousness is not simply static. Moreover, it is in the process of expanding through technology. This consciousness expansion
is created on the one hand by mind manifest hallucinogens and on the
other by a partnership with machines. Synesthetic cinema is the only
language suited to the post-industrial and post-literate age with its
multi-dimensional simulsensory network of information sources. An
increasing number of inhabitants, he writes, live in another world, and
the synesthetic cinema belongs to this other counter-culture world, a
world that is other to commercial media.25
Although this form existed at the turn of the century and Abel
Gances three-screen manifesto Napoleon (1927) sought to revolutionize
visual culture just as sound was coming to the cinema,26 Youngblood
asks why it took so long for the multi-screen cinema to come of age. The
answer to this question is simple, television is the software of the
earth.27 It has made film obsolete as a documentary technology (transformed it into art) and connected it into and helped to consolidate the
intermedia network of magazines, books, radio, recorded music, photography. All media are the new environment; they are nature as McLuhan would posit: discontinuous, fragmented, and interconnected like a
labyrinth. Screens become architecture because of televisions selfreflexive ubiquity there is no outside or inside to televisual images:
The videosphere is the noosphere transformed into a perceivable
state.28 It is not that the screen disappears but that the screen as support is materialized as an object alongside or within another screen ad
infinitum. The medium is the message and thus the screen and the
building that houses the screen and the city that houses the theatre are
all part of the ever-expanding or imploding picture of the earth which
the Russian satellite Sputnik had delivered in 1957.
While we might have seen screens within screens in the history of
cinema, multiple screens or video walls became a common prop in the
popular television culture (especially American) of the fifties and sixties. So often science fiction and spy serials used television monitors to
connote the surveillance and high-tech control of space. We could read
Fig. 1.1 Table I, Presentations at Expo 67, reproduced from Fran Lewin, Man and His Sound Expo 67, Journal of the
SMPTE (March 1968).
38
Janine Marchessault
this as the fundamental shift in the popular imaginary towards understanding simultaneity as a space to be controlled. McLuhan would
state in War and Peace in the Global Village: As visual space is superseded, we discover that there is no continuity or connectedness let
alone depth and perspective.29 This is where space becomes acoustic
(space-time).
This idea of cinema as environment was intrinsic to The Labyrinth
Project, and the influence of television on the Unit B directors is well
known. The shift from theatrical to non-theatrical distribution of NFB
films in the early fifties began an involvement with television that
would influence how documentaries were being made. Essentially,
when the Film Board began to make content for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), the Unit B in particular was involved in
making short documentaries for television with The Candid Eye series.
The films for The Candid Eye were akin to found stories (Kracauer),
which had no beginning, middle, or end.30 The films were heavily influenced by the realist aesthetics of Cartier-Bresson in which everyday life
reveals itself photographically and phenomenologically in a decisive
moment.31 This shift to television affected the way films were produced, exerting an increased demand on film production. Not only was
there a growing need for more films, but the films had to be produced
more rapidly. The demand was for Canadian realities, for multiple realities distributed to multiple destinations around Canada.
One fact that often goes unrecognized is the NFBs substantial technological innovations in the areas of sound recording, film cameras,
and projection.32 These contributions were all geared around mobility
of the camera in both animation and live action, and of film exhibition.
Two of the most important technological innovations towards this
quest for mobility, as Gerald Graham has called it, are the first synchronous sound recording technologies produced by the Board in 1955,
which enabled a greater flexibility for location shooting and helped to
consolidate the NFBs reputation in the area of cinema direct.33 The
other innovation, pioneered at Expo, was the development of largescreen projection using 70 mm and 35 mm film, which eventually grew
into IMAXs 70 mm film projection. For The Labyrinth Project, the NFB
developed a synchronous multi-screen shooting apparatus made out of
five Arriflexes mounted in a cruciform shape (fig. 1.2). The cameras
could operate all together or in combinations. The films were projected
using five synchronized projectors set out in a similar shape. Both the
camera and projection apparatus adapted the principles of television
Fig. 1.2 Chamber 3, cruciform screens. In the Labyrinth, 1967, National Film
Board of Canada (all rights reserved).
studio switching technology, which enabled greater flexibility in covering simultaneous actions.
Thus, we find two kinds of screen expansions developed by the NFB.
In the first, we are dealing with the content of the frame the camera
and sound apparatus are set free to document the outside world
because they are no longer tied to studio shooting (the division
between outside and inside breaks down). In the second, which builds
on the first, the spectator is set free in a new cinema architecture to create individualized views through screens that exceed any one persons
perception.34 Both of these innovations are geared towards greater participation and interactivity on the part of filmmakers and spectators.
Arguably, this increased mobility and expansion, the opening up of
new spaces of apprehension, is tied to the contradictory forces of capitalist media expansion: these produce a greater democracy of image
production and consumption, and greater social and economic control
40
Janine Marchessault
over images. I will explore this point further on, but for now, suffice it to
say that both Low and Kroitor believed that the synesthetic cinema they
were designing for Expo was a new medium that could well revolutionize visual culture.
Labyrinthe
( ... )
The river is moving
The blackbird must be flying
It was evening all afternoon
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird35
Labyrinthe originated from Colin Lows idea for an in situ film. As he

describes: The audience walks through a door into a darkened room
and everything is subdued. Suddenly, the room lights go out and they
are standing on a glass floor looking down 1,000 feet into the middle of
Montreal.36 The first image for the screen experiment was an aerial
view of the city in which the audience was suspended in space. The
experiment did not quite work, but the entire structure grew out of this
idea of space travel which they had already pioneered in several
award-winning animation films: City of Gold (1957) and Universe (1960).
As is mythological by now, the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick was deeply
impressed by Universe and approached Low (who met with him several
times) to work on the space design for his film 2001: A Space Odyssey
(1968). But Low was busy with The Labyrinth Project, which took five
years to make.37
Briefly, Labyrinthe dealt with Mans conquest of himself. The
approach was framed by the Greek myth of Theseus and the Minotaur,
which was a half-man and half-bull creature that lived inside the Labyrinth of Crete. Theseuss quest was to find his way through the labyrinth
and slay the Minotaur. Low and Kroitor used the story in consultation
with Northrop Frye as a frame in which to design a narrative about individual self-realization, whereby the beast to be killed is the one that lives
in all of us. The aim was to produce a ritual or artistic experience to
create a state of mind. Low and Kroitors production notes describe the
methodology:
We are making a pictorial labyrinth of life, as it now is on this planet. In
a labyrinth, the point is to choose the path that leads to the goal, i.e., to
avoid the false turns, the cul-de-sacs. In life, there is no way of knowing
beforehand what these false turns may be before one gets into them.
There is no royal road to wisdom. Only experience can teach that, if it
ever does. The labyrinth we are making is therefore not with the point;
do this or do that. The only guide there can be in life is a state of mind
... The point of the labyrinth is the discovery that such a state of mind
exists. In order that this discovery can take place (to whatever degree), a
journey is undertaken, in ritual form. By ritual form is meant that the
participant partakes of certain experiences, but is not actually personally
involved in them. (Perhaps the correct technical word is not ritual but
artistic).38
Low had been particularly interested in the myth from Mary Renaults
book The King Must Die, which was a popularization of the story.39 The
Labyrinth Project was working with a common story or a proto-story
that is structured through different stages corresponding to different
states of being which the exhibition would induce. The myth itself is a
narrative that appears in different religions and cultures, and the use of
it in this project lends an experience of objectivity: This is not a matter
of personal opinion, it is part of current knowledge, mostly expressed
either in academic writing or in veiled fashion in various religions, etc.,
neither area of which is really part of the present world psyche.40
Northrop Frye was a crucial consultant for the project, and several of
his essays appear alongside production notes. He also attended meetings at various stages of the projects development. An excerpt from his
newly published book Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology
(1963) that appears among Tom Dalys production notes might shed
some light on the suggestion that artistic experience be the ultimate
goal of Labyrinthe. Looking to Wallace Stevenss speculations on the
imagination, Frye explains that art is a unity of being and knowing,
existence and consciousness, achieved out of the flow of time and the
fixity of space.41 Stevenss poetry, with its emphasis on multiplicity
and facticity, is particularly apt for understanding synethestic cinema.
We can also comprehend the logic of how temporal flow and spatial fixity come together in the merging of architecture and cinema.
42
Janine Marchessault
Fig. 1.3 Floorplan of the Labyrinth building. In the Labyrinth, 1967, National
Film Board of Canada (all rights reserved).
The architecture designed to house the multi-screen presentation

was itself a labyrinth (fig. 1.3). The building was a five-storey, pouredconcrete edifice that contained two viewing theatres (Chamber 1 and
Chamber 3) and a transitional zigzag space for disorientation or reflection between the two theatres called The Maze. The entire space was
able to handle about 720 people at a time, and there were ten shows a
day. The path followed by the audience was the thread of a persons
life from childhood through to old age. The Expo guide described it:

They [spectators] will be distributed in groups through the three chambers, and at one stage will be surrounded by reflected images on all sides.
At another point, they will gaze down from ramps on a huge screen 40 feet
below and be subjected to sensations so strong that some will want to grab
the handrail. Film for Labyrinthe has been specially shot by cameramen in
many countries. There are no name stars to this movie the main character
is Man! In the second chamber, visitors move along walkways set between
mirrored glass prisms. In the final chamber, the audience faces a multiscreen battery of unparalleled scope using five screens, so that areas of
the mind are exercised that almost certainly have not been exercised
before.42
The guide reinforced the sense that this cinema experience would irrevocably transform viewers it promised a visceral and unforgettable
experience. Labyrinthe proved to be one of the most popular highlights
of Expo 67 with audiences waiting in line for up to seven hours to get
into the forty-five minute screening.43
Chamber 1: Childhood, Confident Youth (70 mm 2)

The theatre in the first chamber was designed in a horseshoe form with
the screens organized in an L shape both vertically and horizontally (fig.
1.4). From eight balconies on four levels on either side, audience members could peer over to a screen that rose forty feet in height or down
onto the floor at one long horizontal screen. Five sound systems and 288
smaller speakers throughout the theatre ensured that the sound reinforced a powerful illusion and increased the sensation of vertigo created
by looking down on the images. In fact Chamber 1 was able to reproduce such powerful sensations of moving through space that NFB officials were worried that the film would induce anxiety, depression, or
even suicide in spectators.44 No such thing happened, but this possibility of course increased the notoriety of the screen experiment.
Chamber 2: The Maze

The Desert or The Maze was to be, Frye suggested, like the city on a
hot summer day.45 Wendy Michener described it as a kind of acid
trip.46 Colin Low, who designed it, described it in the following way:
The maze was three prisms in an octagonal room full of mirrors on all the
44
Janine Marchessault
Fig. 1.4 Chamber 1, vertical and horizontal screens. In the Labyrinth, 1967,
National Film Board of Canada.
walls, floor and ceiling. The prisms were made of partial-silvered glass so
when the lights were on the audience, it would be the audience reflected
back to itself, and when the lights went off the audience and came on in
the prisms, it made an infinity of stellar lights. A cosmos.47
It was a zigzagging passageway of mirrored glass that both reflected
and transmitted a multiplicity of different flashing lights that were triggered by an experimental soundtrack combining electronic and animal
sounds. The installation was meant to enhance the sense of disorientation, to break down boundaries between identities, human and nonhuman, creating an endless, acoustic, decentred space. When the light
caught a person in the mirror, the image was dissipated across an infinity of spaces. Once the audience had walked down the intimate corridor, they entered the final phase of their journey.
Chamber 3: Death/Metamorphosis (35 mm 5)

The last chamber resembled a standard theatre with seats. An arrangement of five screens in cruciform shape, meant to reference the tree of
life, created a visual climax. Both films produced for Chambers 1 and 3
were close to twenty minutes in length and contained images shot in
half a dozen countries including Cambodia, Japan, Ethiopia, Greece,
and Russia. The films included all ages and genders and focused on
cultural rituals and everyday gestures in these different countries: a
crocodile hunt in southern Ethiopia, baptism in Greece, childbirth in
Montreal, a ballet lesson in Russia, a traffic officer, train commuters,
Montreal streets during a snowstorm, landscapes. The soundtrack for
both films included snippets of voice-over, recorded location sound,
and a music score composed by NFB staff composer Eldon Rathburn.
Tom Daly devised a special system of vertical editing for both films
which juxtaposed lengthy, unedited sequences so as not to oversaturate viewers with too much information.48
Scenes were sometimes continuous over the screens; in Chamber 1,
for example, a boxer falls to the ground from one screen onto another,
or a child feeds a goldfish which swims on a lower screen. Actions were
also fragmented and repeated across the multiple screens. Colin Low
breaks down the new compositional possibilities offered by the technology whose ultimate image would no doubt be electronic, with stereoscopic images, perhaps a development of holograms:
(1) flexibility in alteration of image composition;
(2) simultaneous representation of events:
(a) different events occurring at different times or in different locations,
(b) different time segments of the same event, and
(c) the same event seen from different positions and points of view;
46
Janine Marchessault
(3) enrichment of image by juxtaposition of several elements of the same
event or location;
(4) possibility of a kind of visual metaphor or simile; and
(5) representation of two or more events converging and merging into a
single event or a single event fragmented into several images.49
The principle aesthetic quality of the multi-screen cinema was simultaneity. It is this single quality which calls up memory (sometimes longforgotten) and imagination to make sense of the stimuli. Multi-screen,
according to Roman Kroitor, is to single-screen what the language of
poetry is to the language of prose.50 As McLuhan, who was no doubt
referring to Labyrinthe, noted: Multi-screen projection tends to end the
story-line, as the symbolist poem ends narrative in verse. That is, multiple screens in creating a simultaneous syntax eliminates the literary
medium from film.51 Multi-screen cinema as a synesthetic medium
was understood by the Labyrinthe producers as a new language capable
of accessing the unconscious mind and releasing new kinds of associations deeply buried in the human psyche. A multi-channel soundtrack
helped to create focal points in relation to the total image. Indeed the
multi-image was conceived as sound, that is, as boundless, simultaneous, multi-directional. Sound liberates the image from the constraints of the single screen as images are merged in the same way it is
possible to merge sounds.52
The image in the multi-screen cinema is liberated not only from the
screen but also from the constraints of traditional forms of drama, story,
and plot. For Youngblood, this represents the natural evolution of the
cinema. Synesthetic cinema transcends the old languages just as television transforms the earth into software. It is the reflexivity of television
that brings everything, including the act of viewing, into view as a
world of simultaneous becoming.53
The Labyrinthe theatre had all the spatial attributes of the mega-city
as Reyner Banham described Expo, replete with mechanical movement, a multiplicity of levels, emphasis on fun or ludique experiences,
people in complex environments, and information saturation.54 Traffic
flow was strictly controlled by a master programmer who oversaw the
flow in a time sequence organized like a sausage machine.55 One may
wonder how the Labyrinthe theatre functioned as a space of drift aimed
at exercising areas of the brain generally not used56 if the movement
was so orchestrated. Yet it was the space between the images of the theatre, the arrangement of the screens and mirrors, their multiplicity, and
the extensive range of documentary information that created an open

space for audience participation. It is here that the senses were invited
to wander across possible paths, which required an act of both memory
and imagination. This is precisely where the synesthetic cinema and the
act of flnerie come together in the future city as Youngblood explained
it:
We have learned that synesthetic cinema is an alloy achieved through
multiple superimpositions that produce syncretism. Syncretism is a total
field of harmonic opposites in continual metamorphosis: this metamorphosis produces a sense of kinesthesia that evokes in the inarticulate consciousness of the viewer recognition of an overall pattern event that is in
the film itself as well as the subject of the experience ... A mythopoetic reality is generated through post stylization of unstylized reality.57
The design for Labyrinthe did not simply include multiple screens but,
rather, a fluid space for viewing as a transformative artistic activity.
Low spent much time designing the mezzanine area, which included
several dramatic displays of labyrinths throughout time. The material
space of viewing and the very act of viewing are very much part of the
films. This is the temporal dynamic that is included in Labyrinthe as a
theatrical performance of expanded screens and intermediality the
merging of screen and architecture. The pavilion was designed so that
audience members would exit with a view of the St Lawrence River. In
keeping with the humanist spirit of Labyrinthe, the final view also
included Safdies utopian vision of community living, Habitat.
The Labyrinth Project can be read as the sensory training ground for
the new global citizen, where simultaneous information inputs create
not confusion which numbs the senses but a new oceanic consciousness.58 This represents the world in all its plurality, which in NFB style,
in the Canadian Liberal governments style, was read as the mythological cultural mosaic of humankind that was the basis for Pierre
Trudeaus new plan for Canadian federalism.
Colin Low did not continue to work on the project with Roman
Kroitor, who was able to develop it into a new technology called IMAX.
He left the project just as it was being redevised as a commercial technology. Instead, he went to work on the anti-poverty program at the
NFB called Challenge for Change. A citizens action media experiment
that began on the Fogo Islands in Newfoundland, this communitybased project used 16 mm, Super 8, and video to foster inter-community
48
Janine Marchessault
communication between the islanders, and between the islanders and

government agencies. The future of the audio-visual revolution, for
him, lay in the small screens, the do-it-yourself technologies of video
and community-based television that, for a brief time (and arguably to
this day), enabled greater citizen participation and democratic expression. This is the model of decentralized communication that defines
todays alternative media networks. While the synesthetic multi-screen
cinema did not grow into the new revolutionary medium many thought
it would, one can see in the expanded-screen experiments at Expo a
foreshadowing of the intermedia networks, the mobility of images, the
cultures of the Internet, and the concomitant multiplication of screens in
everyday life around the world.
NOTES
I would like to thank Scott McFarlane for his help with research and for his
impeccable insights into the Labyrinthe materials. The essay was presented at
the Montreal at Street Level Conference held at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in collaboration with the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University in
April 2005. A later version of the paper was presented as part of the McLuhan
Lectures at the University of Toronto in July 2005. I am grateful to Carolyn
Guertin and Dominique Scheffel-Dunand for their critical responses.
1 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962); Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, ed. W. Terrence Gordon (Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 2003); Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and
Cultural Form, 2nd ed., ed. Ederyn Williams (London: Routledge, 1990).
2 Expo 67 was held in Montreal from 28 April to 27 October 1967. Sixty-one
countries participated. Library and Archives of Canada has an excellent
website that brings together many of the original documents and photographs of the event: http://www.collectionscanada.ca/expo/.
3 Tom Gunning, The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis Worlds Fair 1904, Film History: An International Journal 6, no. 4 (1994): 423.
4 Dean Walker, After Expo, Movies Wont Be the Same, Canadian Industrial
Photography, NovemberDecember 1966, 323, 38.
5 Andr Bazin, The Myth of Total Cinema, in What Is Cinema? vol. 1, trans.
Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 1722.

6 See Peter Weibel, Expanded Cinema, Video and Virtual Environments,
in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and
Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 11025. Such experiments are tied to an important history of the media, as Weibel has
argued, that is so often overlooked in accounts of the language of new
media.
7 Expo reports that almost one million school children attended the fair
through school trips, mostly from central Canada. Expo is still influencing
school curriculum. The Archives of Canada is embarking on a new project
which features instructional material on Expo 67 available to Quebec teachers. The project is geared to students from the third year of elementary
school to the fifth year of secondary school. One of the most interesting sections concerns simulation and media experiments at Expo. http://www.
collectionscanada.ca/education/expo/index-e.html.
8 Marshall McLuhan, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man (New
York: Vanguard, 1951), 3.
9 Judith Shatnoff, Expo 67: A Multiple Vision, Film Quarterly 21, no. 1 (1967):
2.
10 Cf. Ben Highmore, Machinic Magic: IBM at the 19641965 New York
Worlds Fair, New Formations 51 (2004): 12848.
11 Jacob Siskind, Expo 67 Films (Montreal: Tundra Books, 1967).
12 Expo 67: An Experiment in the Development of Urban Space, Architectural
Record, July 1966, 16973.
13 Gunning, The World as Object Lesson, 423.
14 Expo 67, Architectural Record, 170.
15 For more on the Explorations Group, see Janine Marchessault, Marshall
McLuhan: Cosmic Media (London: Sage, 2005), chap. 5.
16 McLuhan, Understanding Media, 52.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 55.
19 R. Buckminster Fuller, Introduction to Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood (New York: Dutton, 1970), 35.
20 Yale Joel, A Film Revolution to Blitz Mans Mind, Life, 14 July 1967, 2, 8.
21 Robert Fulford, This Was Expo (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1968), 87.
22 Siskind, Expo 67 Films, 10; cf. Jeffrey Stantons impressionistic account in
Experimental Multi-Screen Cinema at Expo 67, http://naid.sppsr.ucla.
edu/expo67/map-docs/cinema.htm, and interview with Michael Naimark, Interval Trip Report: Worlds First Interactive Filmmaker, Prague
(1998), http://www.naimark.net/writing/trips/praguetrip.html.
50
Janine Marchessault
24 R.G. Collingwood, Principles of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1938), 223,

quoted in Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, 76.
26 Cf. Nelly Kaplan, Napoleon (London: BFI Publishing, 1994).
28 Ibid.
29 Marshall McLuhan, War and Peace in the Global Village (New York: Bantam,
1968), 13.
30 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997).
31 Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Decisive Moment, in Photography in Print, ed.
Vicki Goldberg (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 384
6; cf. Seth Feldman, The Days before Christmas and the Days before That, in
Candid Eyes: Essays in Canadian Documentary, ed. Jim Leach and Jeannette
Sloniowski (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003), 3147.
32 Cf. Gary Evans, In the National Interest: A Chronicle of the National Film Board
of Canada from 19491989 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991).
33 Gerald Graham, Canadian Film Technology 18961986 (Newark: University of
Delaware Press, 1989), 189237.
34 Marc Glassman and Wyndham Wise, Interview with Colin Low, Part II,
Take One 26 (winter 2000): 32.
35 Wallace Stevens, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, in The Collected
Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1972), 945.
36 Ibid., 23.
37 Marc Glassman and Wyndham Wise, Interview with Colin Low, Part I,
Take One 23 (spring 1999): 2930.
38 NFB Archives. Minute no. 3, Labyrinth Design Committee Meeting, Saturday, 11 April 1964. Present: Roman Kroitor, Wolf Koenig, Fernand Cadieux,
Colin Low, Joan Hensen, Jo Kirkpatrick, Hugh OConnor.
39 Glassman and Wise, Interview, Part II, 23.
40 Minute no. 3.
41 Northrop Frye, Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology (New York and
London: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 241.
42 Expo 67 Official Guide (Maclean-Hunter Publishing, 1967), 567.
44 National Film Board of Canada Technical Operations Branch, Labyrinthe
Technical Bulletin no. 8, March 1968.
45 Minute no. 3.
46 Wendy Michener, Through a Multi-Screen Darkly, Macleans, 17 September
1966, 578.

48 Colin Low, Multi-Screens and Expo 67, Journal of the Society of Motion
Picture and Television Engineers 77, no. 3 (March 1968): 185.
49 Ibid.
50 Quoted in ibid.
51 Marshall McLuhan, Counter Blast (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1969),
24.
52 Low, Multi-Screens and Expo 67, 185.
54 Reyner Banham, Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past (New York:
Harper and Row, 1976), 177.
55 NFB Bulletin.
56 Expo 67 Official Guide, 67.
58 Ibid.
2 Sounds Complicated: What Sixties Audio

Experiments Can Teach Us about the New
Media Environments
s t e p h e n c ro ck e r
The Multiple Nature of Media Environments

The digital revolution represents a change not just in machinery but
also in human nature. The cell phone, the Internet, wireless networks,
and ubiquitous computing change the basic phenomenological structures of experience. We are beginning to live in new kinds of environments, one of the defining features of which is the ease with which
information and sensations may be cut out of one location and
pasted into another. Today, this disembedding and re-embedding, as
Anthony Giddens has called it, has reached such a level of complexity
that it is no longer enough to say, as we did about newspaper and television, for example, that media add something to our environments.1
For now the very idea of environment has changed. Presence awareness the new horizon for communication technologies means that
the system is continuously present and continuously on. The participational nature of MSN Messenger is the basic form of interaction for a
range of other kinds of exchanges, from the most spectacular effects of
remote control telemedicine to the basic daily functions of driving,
shopping, and being at home. Being online and part of the system is
now the default mode of existence. Now, you must actively choose not
to share your presence and not to transmit and receive. And as earlier
media such as phone, print, photography, and speech become digitized, they too are all folded into the same ever-present multimedia
environment.
The consequences of these changes in our basic ideas of presence,
sensation, and relation to others are not at all clear. Is global interconnectedness an advance in the human condition, or will it only serve to
Sixties Audio Experiments
53
desensitize and alienate us from what is real? It is not difficult to find

support for either of these positions.
In September 2002, at the Ars Electronica Festival in Austria, the
composers Scott Gibbons and Gregory Shakar created a symphony for
cell phones.2 Using an elaborate computerized switchboard, they activated the ringers on audience cell phones in complex rhythms and
pulses. The mobiles intolerable ringing, more than any other noise,
symbolizes the invasion of technology into the most intimate realms of
life. Removed from the busyness in which we usually experience it,
however, and without its sense of urgency, the watery tinkling of five
hundred mobiles has a strange and beautiful quality, like the ping of
rain on plastic bags, or ice cracking up under salt. It is as though we can
hear at a whole new frequency range, where the buzz of interconnectivity and the clamour of our being together are rendered rhythmically
intelligible.
We find an opposite, critical reaction to the multimediated life in the
Dogme 95 manifesto signed a few years back by Lars Von Trier and a
group of Danish filmmakers.3 Their manifesto gave voice to a widespread dissatisfaction with the special-effects-driven, artificial feel of
multimediated art. In opposition to the desensitized, overly manufactured environment, Dogme films would work only with available
sound and light. The new Danish puritanism raised an interesting
problem. For it emerged just as we had reached a kind of point of no
return in the mid-1990s, when, with the omnipresence of Internet and
wireless telephony, it would be far more difficult and artificial to
cleanse a place of external sound and light than it would be to work
with existing resources.
Dogme films were all made in remote locations where it is easier to
police the borders of an environment and to filter the sensations that
pass in and out of it. Most of us, however, cannot control our environments in this way. We find ourselves already thrown into a mass of sensations through which we must learn to navigate. This is how I find myself now as I write in a hotel room in Helsinki. All you need in order to
write, thought Virginia Woolf, is a room of your own. But the sensations
and information that make this room into a lived space are global in
reach, and only in a very limited sense are they mine. The presence of the
phone, the television, my laptop, the Internet connection, and the range
of other media with which I am in constant contact here make it difficult to determine the boundaries of the room. Philip Glasss soundtrack
from The Hours, which I downloaded on Kazaa from multiple sources all
54
Stephen Crocker
over the world before I left St Johns, blends in with the rolling metal
squeak of the street car on Franzeninkatu, the distant beat of reggae
music from the club down the street, the news broadcast from CNN a
floor below, and the sound of Get Smart dubbed into Finnish that booms
from the next room. In the midst of all this, how can I say what belongs to the room and what makes it my own?
One popular response to this situation is to suppose that, in the age of
global communication, a room, or even a city, is not a unified location.
It is a phantasmagoria of globally dispersed, heterogeneous sensations
and disconnected fragments of information that lack any overriding
unity. Helsinki is not a single, definable entity. It is a nexus, a matrix, or
a nodal point. This idea, which became popular in the 1980s and 1990s,
emphasizes the centrifugal effects of global media. The collapse of
older, metaphysical ideas of unity leaves us with scraps and fragments
of sense that have spun out from the collapsing centres. With this
change comes a new kind of sense perception a distracted or even
schizophrenic consciousness.
What strikes me here in my room in Helsinki, however, is the ease
with which all these widely differing sounds and sensations adhere
together in some strange new kind of unity that does not make it difficult to pay attention to what I am doing, but even provides a kind of
nest for thinking.
Instead of focusing on the disembedding of things and the empirical
diversity of sensations, my impulse is to try to understand how things
re-embed and go together now. Clearly sensations do not hang together
in any simple kind of unity. Friedrich Kittler has pointed out that the
staggering rate of expansion and change of technology now makes it
impossible to describe it in its totality. New media defy any holistic definition, not just because of the continual addition of the latest piece of
software or gadgetry, but also because of the way each new part produces an ecological change in the whole environment. Nevertheless, I
am going to suggest that there is one constant feature about the new
multimedia environments that we can describe, which is their multiple
character. As will become clear, I mean multiple here in a strong sense.
It is not just that the new media environments contain multiple things,
but that they are themselves multiplicities, in the sense that Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Serres give to that term.
A multiplicity is an array of mutually interpenetrating parts that can
coalesce into a kind of quasi-whole, which is not fixed, or fully formed,
but shifts and changes with the changes in the parts. Multiplicity
55
becomes more important and relevant an idea the more that multi and
multiple become a regular part of our daily lexicon. All the keywords
that describe our new technologically mediated, global environment
invoke the multiple: multimedia, multitasking, multimodal, multisensory, multicultural, multidimensional, multinational. What does multiple mean in these cases? The multiple in multiplicity is not just an
adjective that describes a number of pre-existing things. Multinational,
for instance, does not mean many nations. Multi describes an organizational logic that qualifies the sense in which nation, media, or task is
understood. In a multiplicity all the parts are dependent on one another
and go together as a group. They form a whole. But the whole that they
form changes with the change among the parts. A multiplicity is an
open whole, if you like. What matters is that it is neither a unified thing
nor simply a set of fragments. It is an internally differentiated whole
that is changing in time.
Michel Serres gives us many beautiful examples of multiplicities: A
flight of screaming birds, a school of herring tearing through the water
like a silken sheet, a cloud of chirping crickets, a booming whirlwind of
mosquitoes ... crowds, packs, hordes on the move.4 It is not difficult to
add to Serress list. An audience clapping is one thunderous affirmation
with its own patterns and rhythms. It is at the same time, though, an
untold number of tiny distinct sounds that are present at the same
moment. Our built environments now share many of these qualities.
We need new concepts to describe these kinds of environments because
the interpenetration of different kinds of sensation and information,
which they make possible, surpasses the dialectic of unity and fragmentation in which many of our most familiar philosophical and sociological ideas originate.
While multiplicity is a rigorous philosophical concept that aims to
unsettle the old Platonic dialectic of the one and the many, we should not
think of it as a rarefied theoretical abstraction. Instead, it describes our
most common encounters with the world. In fact, what is abstract is the
expectation that the world should be either fully unified or fully fragmented. Dont we most commonly find ourselves in the midst of uncompleted projects that we have taken up or, more likely, been thrown into,
and in which things have been intertwined to the point where they cannot be separated without being radically altered? For this reason Michel
Serres says that we should understand multiplicity not as an epistemological monster but rather as the ordinary lot of situations, including
that of the ordinary scholar, regular knowledge, ordinary work, in short
56
Stephen Crocker
our common object ... We recognize it everywhere yet reason still insists
on ignoring it.5 Here is how Serres describes multiplicity:
The multiple as such: heres a set undefined by elements or boundaries.
Locally, its not individuated; globally, its not summed up. So its neither
a flock, nor a school, nor a heap, nor a swarm, nor a herd, nor a pack. It is
not an aggregate; it is not discrete. Its a bit viscous perhaps. A lake under
the mist, the sea, a white plain, background noise, the murmur of a crowd,
time.6
In Serress work, sound and noise are the paradigmatic examples of

multiplicity. Following this lead, I will try to describe the multiple character of the new media environments by focusing on a single quality:
their audile, or sound, quality. In the past few years, much has been
written about the role that vision has played in structuring the modern
world. I am going to suggest instead that we stand to learn something
important about our present situation by studying the way sound
structures the environment and alters our consciousness. Marshall
McLuhan pioneered the audile analysis of global media. I try to
develop McLuhans ideas in new ways by linking them to an intellectual tradition that he did not pursue. For, ever since Leibniz and, more
recently, through the work of Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze, and
Michel Serres, the analysis of sound has offered a way of understanding the organizational structure of open unities, or multiplicities.7 Following Serress suggestion that hearing is a model of understanding,8
I pay attention to three particular qualities of the sound environment:
the omnidirectional nature of sound, the passive manner in which we
receive it, and the kind of organizational structure that results from the
mixing together and layering of disparate sounds. Taken together, these
three features point to a very different sense of the aesthetic and phenomenological changes we are now living through than do the tired
images of fragmented perception and distracted consciousness that
have dominated cultural theory and visual studies in recent years.
In the first part of the essay, I consider a number of sound experiments from the 1960s as early encounters with the multiple character of
media environments. What I propose is that recorded and layered
sound provided ways of experimenting with the new kind of unities
that could be created with disembedded sensations. Recorded sound in
particular greatly facilitated what Michel Chion and Pierre Schaffer call
reduced listening, which is listening to sound not for evidence about
57
the world but for insight into the nature of complex sensations.9 I am
not suggesting that hearing is a more fundamental sense than vision or
smell or any of the others. It is more a matter of strategy. I am hoping
that audile analysis might provide a way of displacing the hegemony of
vision and getting at wider changes in the nature of sensation. Thus, the
conclusion reached here is that digital media, or multimedia, do not
alienate or desensitize us. In fact, the global circulation of money,
images, messages, products, and ideas makes possible new kinds of
insights into the nature of sensations and the complex unities in which
we are now involved.
Glenn Goulds Three-Dimensional Environment
At the height of his career, Glenn Gould, one of the worlds greatest
concert pianists, quit the stage. To the astonishment of his followers,
Gould left the recital hall to explore new forms of electronic communication such as radio, television, and recorded sound. In his new experiments with sound aesthetics, Gould tried to understand how our basic
notions of sensation, presence, and consciousness were being changed
by new globalizing media. The sort of environment he studied is more
prevalent now than when he first began to probe it. As such, it might
turn out that, much like Marxs analysis of nascent capitalism, Goulds
insights are even more revealing of our present than of his own time.
Gould left the stage because he was excited by the potential of the
new multidimensional environment, which could not be fully appreciated in the isolated atmosphere of the concert hall. He was no doubt
influenced in this thinking by his long-time friend and mentor Marshall
McLuhan. In a conversation with McLuhan, recorded the same year he
quit his live performances, Gould reports on the strange new multidimensional quality his playing has taken on. He tells McLuhan that he
expects that in the future it will not seem strange to play the piano, as
he has now begun to do, along with the noise of two radios or a television. The Goldberg Variations accompanied by the white noise of the TV
set is not only the sign of a new kind of sound but a whole new way of
living that Gould calls three-dimensional experience.10
McLuhan is not surprised by this idea. After all, multidimensionality was already a central feature of his own theory of global media. In
Understanding Media and other books, McLuhan tried to show that global electronic communication produces a new depth of experience in
which each of our actions implicates us in the actions of distant others.
58
Stephen Crocker
We now live in three dimensions, McLuhan says, even if we continue

to think on single planes.11
Gould and McLuhan recognized that changes produced by electric
sound were not just isolated aesthetic concerns but indications of farreaching transformations in the human condition. And they were not
the only ones coming to this realization. Anyone who was anyone in
the 1960s was experimenting with the environmental effects of multidimensional sound. John Cage, the Beatles, William S. Burroughs,
Michael Snow, Rolf Lieberman, and others were all finding, in the daily
clamour and background buzz of the world, resources for a new kind of
sensory awareness and perception.12
For John Cage, the hum of electrical sound provided a new opportunity for aesthetic experimentation. All through his long career Cage
remained fascinated by the inescapable background noises of modern
living the whirr of electricity, the continuous rumbling of traffic, the
murmur of urban life. What he found interesting in all of this was not
the sheer diversity of sounds, but their capacity to congeal together. In
one of his experiments, Cage set out to determine the total number of
audio sources among which a subject could distinguish before they all
blended into a single new whole. What he discovered was that perception reaches a new threshold when five or more sounds are mixed
together. At this point, the original audile elements lose their former
outlines and merge into a whole new acoustical unity. Quantity turns
into quality, as Hegel might say, when a sufficient number of sounds are
mixed together. They then form a new whole that cannot be divided up
into original pieces. We shall see that this blurring of original outlines
and folding into a new whole are central features of multiplicities.
The wider social and political significance of Goulds and Cages
experiments is not difficult to grasp, for you did not need a sound laboratory to experience the kind of multidimensional quality that fascinated them. It was enough to switch on a tape recorder at any street
corner, workplace, or living room to create the kinds of effects Cage was
measuring. And perhaps the experiments in complex layered sound
did not even require electricity. In another of his experiments, in which
he tried to understand silence, Cage locked himself in a soundproof
room and emerged several hours later to declare that there is no such
thing as silence because even the body produces a multitude of
sounds.13 Could it be that electrical and recorded sound simply allowed
us to recognize that we had always been living in an environment of
multidimensional sound? In either case, by the 1960s it was clear that
59
the flood of visual and acoustic information brought on by global

media, and the sheer density of social interactions this made possible,
changed the nature of sense perception.
This sensory change had been underway for some time. A century
before, Wagner had redesigned the theatre to try to filter out the noise
of the modern world.14 Now Gould and Cage welcomed it back in.
Wagners approach to the noise of modern living was to ask how art
could survive in this environment. Cage and Gould pursued a far more
interesting question: what new kinds of art could emerge in this new
environment or even, as McLuhan wondered, might the multidimensional environment not only contain art, but be art? These questions
echoed concerns voiced earlier in the century by the Italian futurist
Luigi Russolo, in his manifesto on The Art of Noises: Ancient life was all
silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine,
Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the
sensibility of men.15
In typical futurist fashion, Russolo sees in mechanical and electrical
sound not some pernicious side effect of industrialization, but the horizon of a whole new kind of consciousness. An acoustic flaneur could
find beauty in the endless diversity of sounds that others, who had not
yet adapted the appropriate sense organs, might pass off as the detritus
of industrial life:
Let us cross a great modern capital with our ears more alert than our eyes,
and we will get enjoyment from distinguishing the eddying of water, air
and gas in metal pipes, the grumbling of noises that breathe and pulse
with indisputable animality, the palpitation of valves, the coming and
going of pistons, the howl of mechanical saws, the jolting of a tram on its
rails, the cracking of whips, the flapping of curtains and flags. We enjoy
creating mental orchestrations of the crashing down of metal shop blinds,
slamming doors, the hubbub and shuffling of crowds, the variety of din,
from stations, railways, iron foundries, spinning wheels, printing works,
electric power stations and underground railways.16
What is striking in Russolos account is the absence of recorded sound.

The sounds he takes in on his little stroll are all immediate and present.
He has to walk by a machine to hear it. As a result, the environment he
operates in is nowhere near as complex as my hotel room here in Helsinki. The sounds he hears are all stuck to the original vibrations that
produced them and resonate only in the presence of those things.
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Stephen Crocker
How Sound Recording Changes Sense Perception

With the invention of recording machines, sound lost its immediacy.
Katherine Hayles has suggested that sound recording provided one of
the first experiences of disembodiment that prefigures the desire for
more radical kinds of disembodiment expressed today in artificial intelligence research and virtual reality environments.17 For the very same
reason, tape recording is a truly global medium. The tape recorder
made it possible to disembed sounds from their original sources and reembed them in another time and place. The multidimensional world of
Gould, Cage, and McLuhan is above all a world of recorded sound. The
film sound editor Walter Murch explains how the recording of sound
revolutionized sense perception:
For as far back in human history as you would care to go, sounds had
seemed to be the inevitable and accidental (and therefore mostly
ignored) accompaniment of the visual stuck like a shadow to the object
that caused them. And, like a shadow, they appeared to be completely
explained by reference to the objects that gave them birth: a metallic clang
was always cast by the hammer, just as the smell of baking always came
from a loaf of fresh bread. Recording magically lifted the shadow away
from the objects and stood it on its own, giving it a miraculous and sometimes frightening substantiality.18
Recording allowed sound to be disembedded from its original

source, but, more importantly for our purposes, it also allowed it to be
mixed together with other, wholly unrelated sounds. Once sounds
were mixed together they could not be easily divided back into their
original parts, as John Cage discovered. Murch, a film sound editor for
over thirty years, makes much the same point. Murch says that layered
sound becomes dense, and he finds as a sound editor that, in the mixing of sound, density and clarity are always traded off, one for the
other.19
This density of recorded sound made it possible to explore the layered nature of perception in new ways. John Cage incorporated live
electronic and found recorded sound into his music, making a happening out of whatever constellation of sound effects he happened to hit
upon. Gould made the layering and interpenetration of voices and
background sounds the basis of his groundbreaking contrapuntal
radio documentaries. Instead of presenting the usual horizontal mon-
61
tage that moves between distinct well-defined voices, as most radio

does, he presents a vertically layered multitude of overlapping conversations. Out of this noisy banter, Gould allows a phrase, a sentence, an
intervention to well up and then drift back into the great cacophony. In
works like The Idea of North Gould does not add together unified and
readily intelligible bits. He begins with an unstructured dense mass.
From this, he subtracts whatever does not interest him. Gould conducts
the recorded voices as if he were pulling sound out of an orchestra a
baritone voice here, a high laugh there. Each voice is plucked from the
void and then allowed to fall back into it. In the world of pop music,
Brian Wilson and, later, the Beatles used a similar technique on their
later albums. They incorporated background environmental sounds
that were allowed to drift in and out of the audible sphere. This kind of
multidimensional layering soon became a standard motif of the psychedelic sound of Pink Floyd and others. In the 1970s, it gave rise to the
whole new paranoid fascination with the subliminal message, which
consisted of information lurking behind the main foreground plane of
sound a sonic equivalent of the conspiratorial theme that Fredric
Jameson identified in films of the 1970s.20
Multidimensional Life
When we look back on these 1960s experiments now, they might
appear simplistic, if not banal. For the multidimensional experience
that made up the outer edge of experimental aesthetics then is now
among the most practical concerns of efficiency and ergonomics. We
eat, read, wait for airplanes, and even undergo medical treatment to the
noise of the radio and television. A torrent of images and sounds has
transformed our lives, as Todd Gitlin says.21 Informatization has
become a if not the basis of production. As Michel Serres puts it, we
have moved from the age of Prometheus, hero of labour, to the age of
Hermes, the messenger god.22 And with this change the management
of the multiple becomes the central concern of social organization. We
study our efficiency in multitasking to enhance our operation in multidimensional environments. Our homes, offices, and life worlds have
been transformed into devices for coordinating and synthesizing multiple sources of information from widely dispersed environments.
What has occurred since the days of Cage and Gould is nothing less
than a rewiring of our phenomenological infrastructure. A century ago,
Paul Valerys vision of images directly transferred into the home was
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Stephen Crocker
dazzlingly futuristic. Now, even the car, once the symbol of our atomized isolation from each other, is a central network access point to complex global systems. Louis Menand describes the upper-middle-class
experience of a traffic jam in New York City: Six CDs in the changer
and a video playing in the back seat, laptop plugged into the dashboard, cell phone in continual operation, entire families creep along the
conveyor belts that Americas highways have become.23
We readily identify these sorts of environments with the effects of
globalization. In fact, the over-saturated informational context is not
just an aspect of globalization but its very precondition. All the various
kinds of globalization economic, social, technological share the
same form as the disembodied sound that fascinated Gould. They
require that we be present in one situation and at the same time be
attuned to a number of other background ones that originate at a distance from us. And, like the sounds that John Cage mixed up, they
blend together to produce new wholes in which the original divisions
are no longer recognizable.
Focusing on the audile dimension of these changes allows us to consider elements of our contemporary environments that might be overlooked in the visual analysis of modern life. Much has been written, for
example, about the way in which the fixed point of view in Renaissance
perspective creates the condition for our will to a detached mastery of
the world. We regard the globe, like a Renaissance canvas, as a single
space from which we are removed and on which we circulate messages,
money, and commodities. To make this point, Hannah Arendt drew a
direct line from Albertis essay On Painting, which taught us to see the
world through a frame, and the launching of the Sputnik five hundred
years later.24 Heidegger suggested as much with the age of the world
picture, or the world as a picture.
The phenomenology of sound, on the other hand, tells a very different story. Sound is immersive. We find ourselves already thrown into it,
and overwhelmed by it. It addresses us, whether we wish it to or not.
Unlike vision, sound is omnidirectional. There is no acoustic equivalent
of the point of view. There is no one point of mastery from which to listen to the world. There is instead a zone or place of audition.25 And,
because it is omnidirectional, sound is passively received. We do not
gaze out onto an environment of sound; we find ourselves already
immersed in it.
It was sounds immersive, enveloping character that led McLuhan to
believe that it held the key to understanding the global age. The sort of
63
three-dimensional experience that Gould evoked was, for McLuhan,

part of a great epochal shift in Western culture away from the visually
oriented and linear space that emerged in the era of print (the Gutenberg galaxy) to a culture based on electric circuitry and feedback loops,
where things occurred simultaneously and without a central point. The
linear properties of print had produced a linear Cartesian consciousness that mechanically fragmented experience into a series of flat, onedimensional planes. Information is parcelled out in words, pages, and
books. Labour, accordingly, is divided into ever more specialized and
codified tasks. Causes and effects are clearly separated, just as subjects
and objects are. This allowed us to become individual egos with individual points of view.26 Virginia Woolfs Mr Ramsey imagines thought
to be like the alphabet ranged into twenty six letters all in order ... his
splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters
one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q.
He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reached
Q.27
The world of electricity and cybernetic feedback loops, on the other
hand, seems to be better described by the properties of sound and hearing. In sound, as in an electrical environment, there is no center as such,
and the margin is everywhere. We are so deeply immersed in this kind
of environment that it is no longer possible to break it up into discrete
groups, or letters, or to find a detached point of view from which to do
so. That would be like trying to have a point of view while swimming,
McLuhan liked to point out.
Complex Sensations Require Subtractive Perception
Sixties acoustic theory, as we might call it, pointed to a model of perception very different from the familiar Cartesian one to which we had
grown accustomed. Descartes had insisted that perception begins with
clear and distinct simple ideas, from which we build up to more complex forms. In the sound experiments of the sixties, both of Descartess
principles of disembodied thought and simple ideas were placed in
doubt. What we find emerging instead is a deep Bergsonian theme. In
Matter and Memory, Bergson contests the common associationist notion
that perception consists of discrete sensations plus the attention we
bring to them. Instead, he argues that perception is a subtractive operation. When we set out to know we are already adrift in a mass of sensations. We always find ourselves already thrown into a multiplicity a
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Stephen Crocker
virtual totality of sensations that lack clear outlines and divisions. To

perceive in this environment we do not add together bits of information. Just the opposite is true. We subtract from this mass of sensation
what does not interest us, or what is not useful for life. From out of the
mass we divide sensations into groups, categories, distinct things, or
actualities.28
What we experience as a discrete sensation a sound, for example
is the result of our dividing up a multiplicity of sensations. We must be
clear about what Bergson has in mind here. He is not simply suggesting
that we filter out noise to let the signal through. That was still the Wagnerian dream of finding (or creating) a pool of tranquillity beneath the
chaos of urban life. Bergsons idea is different: the signal that we recognize is not something that is there beforehand. What presents itself to us
as a clear signal is produced by our act of cutting up a dense, unclear
signal. Perception moves from a virtual, overdetermined mass to a clear
and distinct signal that is subtracted from it. The selection of a signal,
however, in turn changes the wider ecology of sensations and makes it
possible to link it up with others in another, different configuration.
Thus, we are continuously moving from density to clarity and back to
density once again.
As sound recording made possible a more radical disembedding and
re-embedding of sensation, it greatly facilitated this Bergsonian sensibility. We have already seen that recording removes sound from its
immediate indexical function as a representation of some particular
vibration. When sounds are relieved of their duty to represent events in
the world, they can be called on for different purposes. In John Cages
experiments with live sound, or Rolf Liebermans concert for 164 typewriters, sound is valued not as evidence of the world, but as a sensation
with its own qualities, and with an organizational structure that could
be found not just in the audile dimension, but all throughout the social
sphere.
We can better understand this distinction between sound as evidence
and as sensation by following a distinction proposed by the French
audio theorist Michel Chion. Chion distinguishes between what he
calls causal and reduced modes of listening.29 When we listen causally, we treat sound as evidence of a source of vibration. When we tap
on a chest to determine how full it is, or shout down a dark well to
determine its depth, we are listening to sound for information about its
source. It is this aspect of sound that Murch refers to when he likens
sound to the shadow of an object.
65
The mixing of sound that becomes possible with tape recording puts
this kind of causal listening to the test. When sounds no longer refer
back to their sources, we are able to listen to them not for what
they reveal about the world, but for their own properties as sensations.
This is what Chion, following Pierre Schaffer, calls reduced listening.
Reduced is meant in the phenomenological sense that Husserl gave to
the term. Phenomenological reduction suspends our immediate natural attitude to the world and directs us to the things themselves. For
Gould, McLuhan, Cage, and their contemporaries, the study of sound
was interesting for what it revealed not about a source but about the
organizational structure of sensation.
Multiplicities and Microperceptions:
Leibniz and Virginia Woolf at the Seashore
In a very perceptive essay on the mid-1960s generation of intellectuals
and artists of whom Gould, McLuhan, and Cage were all prime examples Susan Sontag argues that they were united by the conviction that
sensation, rather than the idea, had become the basic unit of art.30 They
were not interested in policing the borders of aesthetics, or explaining
what art means, but rather in analysing and extending sensations. Sontag points out that it was this holistic interest in sensation that propelled the collapse of such familiar distinctions as art and non-art, and
high and low culture. This seems to be especially true of the experiments in sound. Sound provided a way of understanding not just what
an individual sensation consists of, but the way in which a group of
them could form in aggregates or blocs. In this way, sixties audio theory
carried on what had been a kind of subterranean theme in philosophy
and aesthetics.
Bergson had regarded sound and melody as the royal road to understanding the multiple character of complex emotions and sensations.
And, long before him, Leibniz saw in complex sounds a model for
studying phenomena that could not be classified under what were then
the received categories of unity. Gilles Deleuze takes Leibnizs account
of the composite sound of a wave as a paradigmatic example of the
ways in which conscious perception emerges from a folding (fold = pli)
of a multiplicity (multi-ply) of indeterminate perceptions.
The sound of a wave is composed of a thousand tiny (micro) perceptions that are already at work in the background, preparing and following whatever rises to consciousness as a macro perception. The wave
66
Stephen Crocker
is not a simple clear given that produces an effect in us. It is the product
of a set of relations among preconscious or molecular perceptions that
are not in themselves discernible. Here is how Deleuze describes a
wave:
For example, the sound of the sea: at least two waves must be minutely perceived as nascent and heterogeneous enough to become part of a relation
that can allow the perception of a third, one that excels over the others and
comes to consciousness (implying that we are near the shoreline).31
We only get to hear the wave as a composite sound. We cannot get to

the individual bits of sound, even though it is clear that what we hear is
a contraction of smaller units. In order to emerge into consciousness,
the micro perceptions enter into differential relations and together
produce some other, third thing that is different in kind from them. The
sound of a wave therefore exceeds the categories of the general and the
particular, and the one and the many. The composite elements are
smaller than any particular (they are pre-individual because they are
not discrete, distinct things, but differential elements) and larger than
any universal (because the whole can be reconfigured once again). In
fact, when we hear it, it is already on its way to rearticulation.
To further explain how the perceptual qualities of differential elements work, Deleuze gives another, different example of colour. Two
colours such as blue and yellow can be distinct on their own. But they
can also reach a point of indiscernibility where they participate together
to produce the colour green. Green is not a sensation on its own. It is the
result of a set of differential relations among smaller genetic elements.
The same principle is at work when we hear a background murmur
which throws up a multitude of signals that fade back and rise up as
something altogether different.32 Since we already called on Virginia
Woolfs Mr Ramsey as an example of Cartesian consciousness, we
might consider Mrs Ramsey as the aural Leibnizian:
The gruff murmur, irregularly broken by a taking out of pipes and the putting in of pipes which had kept on assuring her, though she could not hear
what was said (as she sat in the window), that the men were happily talking; this sound, which had lasted now half an hour and had taken its place
soothingly in the scale of sounds pressing on top of her, such as the tap of
balls upon bats, the sharp, sudden bark now and then, Hows that? Hows
that? of the children playing cricket, had ceased; so that the monotonous
67
fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured
and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consoling to repeat over
and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle
song, murmured by nature, I am guarding you I am your support, but
at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind
raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly
meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure
of life, made one think of the destruction of the island, and its engulfment
in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing
after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow this sound which
had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror.33
Leibniz and Woolf listen at the seashore not only for evidence that
the world exists, but also for insight into the nature of perception.
Approaching sixties audio experiments as similar kinds of exercises in
understanding the new organizational structures of sensations may
help us think in new ways about the environmental and phenomenological dimensions of globalizing media. For Goulds generation, the
torrent of sound and image does not produce a distracted or fragmented consciousness, but something approaching the composite form
of Leibnizs wave. For that reason, they can provide an important alternative to the images of disintegration and distracted perception that
have become popular ways of describing our consciousness of the globalizing world.
Against Flatness and Distracted Perception
In the 1980s and 1990s it was popular to describe the cultural development of the postwar world as a progressive flattening of experience. In
the absence of any full and whole experience, the world, supposedly,
comes to us in the form of isolated, flat signs. Flatness is the central thesis of what were, arguably, the three most influential works of cultural
theory in the past quarter-century: Jean Baudrillards Simulations, JeanFranois Lyotards The Postmodern Condition, and Fredric Jamesons
Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.34 Lyotard describes
the decline of Enlightenment grand narratives as a flattening of knowledge: The speculative hierarchy of learning gives way to an immanent
and, as it were, flat network of areas of inquiry.35 Fredric Jameson and
Jean Baudrillard identify the same flat quality as the new cultural dom-
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Stephen Crocker
inant of late capitalism, or the hyperreal society. As daily life is speeded

up and plugged into ever wider global circuits of information and
exchange, it becomes more difficult to recognize any pattern in the randomness of events. So many events vie for attention at any one time that
not one of them can command it in its entirety, or in depth. Fredric Jameson famously captures this position with his thesis that late capitalism
produces a schizophrenic consciousness. He took as his model the striking image of a schizophrenic girl who suddenly finds herself cut off
from the world. Radically alone, she stares dumbfounded at a group of
school children singing. She cannot fit this image into any larger pattern: It was as though the school and the children were set apart from
the rest of the world.36 Jameson suggests that the average citizen of consumer society who selects and circulates disembodied signs is similarly
unable to hold together any unified experience and so is restricted to the
schizophrenic use of isolated, flat signifiers.
Since the fundamental feature of the postmodern world was supposed to be its flatness, then depth McLuhans favourite term for
describing the effects of global media was now used to describe the
qualities of a world that was no longer ours. Depth described the centred and totalizing tendencies of depth models of inquiry such as
Freudianism, Marxism, and existentialism. These all called up images
of a central representing subject or a fixed system or totality of ideas
now thought to be leftovers of some theological or essentialist view of
things that had become impossible.
In retrospect, however, now that we are further into the whole process of globalization, there is every reason to believe that the image of a
world of isolated flat sensations does not get at the complexity of our
situation. It presents globalism as a zero sum game in which things
must be either fully unified or altogether without organization. Part of
the problem is that the theory of flatness placed too much emphasis on
the moment of disembedding (or deterritorialization, to use Deleuzes
terminology) and not enough on re-embedding.
But there is a deeper theoretical problem. Flatness and fragmentation
could never provide a powerful enough antidote to the old metaphysical ideas of unity. As Nietzsche, Bergson, Heidegger, and others recognized, fragmentation is only an initial, weak reaction to theological
concepts of unity. The fragment still secretly preserves the figure of
unity it supposedly upsets. What Nietzsche calls Shades of god ghosts
of the metaphysical idea of unity live on in the figure of the fragment.
For this reason, Nietzsche and Bergson both attacked mechanical theories of organization (a tradition inherited by McLuhan).
69
Mechanism breaks the world up into atomistic bits, each of which is

understood to be a discrete entity. But the movement of the world cannot be reconstituted from discrete, static moments, as Bergson pointed
out. Even if the old ideas of unity have disappeared, we still need some
kind of whole in which the scraps and fragments of sense participate. I
have tried to suggest that studying the multiple character of the multimedia environment might provide a way of understanding the new
kinds of holism that are now possible. This requires that we develop a
more rigorous understanding of what multiple means.
Flatness and fragmentation cannot explain the multiple because they
still feed off of the old dialectic of the one and the many, which is too
broad and imprecise to describe the phenomena of multiplicity. If we
think of a multiplicity of organisms, sounds, economic forces as
many things, then we reduce multiplicity to meaning numerous.
Many still derives its meaning from the figure of unity. It means many
single things. This is why Deleuze looks to the theory of multiplicity as
a way of overcoming the abstract opposition between the multiple and
one and of thinking the multiple as a pure state.37 Serres, in similar
fashion, turns to the multiple as a way of escaping the hell of dualism,
that is, of many and one.38
Multiplicity differs from the dialectic of one and many because it
describes the interaction of a set of variables and the relations that organize them into a form. To say that elements are a function of relations is
of course a commonplace of contemporary social and cultural theory.
What is less often acknowledged, however, is that the identity of things
can remain open only to the extent that the relations that connect them
remain open. If the relations of a system were static and unchanging,
the same would be true for the elements that they unite. This is the
downfall of all forms of determinism economic, biological, technological, or otherwise. They give us relational terms but situate these terms
within static relations.
Technically, what distinguishes multiplicity as a theory of organization is that it does not privilege either the variables or the relations. We
have a multiplicity only when the relations are also subject to change
and transformation. In other words, awkward as it may sound, in a
multiplicity relations are themselves relational. Relations change because they are dependent for their very existence, and therefore contingent upon, the things they relate. If relations were not dependent on
their relata, then they would have to find their determination or function in some extra-structural force such as God or nature. In a multiplicity, elements and relations are external to one another and mutually
70
Stephen Crocker
determining. Together they produce a whole that is not a property of

the elements, nor a property of the relations, since neither of these can
ever be given independently, and thus neither one can act as a ground
for the other. Instead, multiplicity is a whole because it describes the coexistence, or the being together of elements and relations. Multiple variables enter into relation and form a unity. In fact, they can be assigned
value and significance only because they participate in a whole. The
whole, therefore, neither is given in advance of the articulation of its
parts nor is simply a result of their addition. The whole of a multiplicity
is contemporary with the parts it unites. It is immanent in the structure
pure immanence, as Deleuze says. It is dependent for its existence on
the things it unites. The elements change their relative positions and
enter into different relations, and through this change, the whole of
which they form a part is transformed and changes qualitatively. All of
this is possible because the elements and relations of a multiplicity
are given together. Anything less would be more abstract and would
describe either completed wholes or separate elements and thus would
not address the open, processual character of things multiple.
Multiplicity Today
We do not really understand the contemporary world if we regard it
either as one integrated system such as global media or capitalism, or as
a chaos of many signs and sensations that lack any unity. When, with
this opposition in mind, we try to comprehend a global event such as
the formation of diasporic communities or the spread of environmental
dangers, we often find ourselves borrowing from one image of globalization (for example, unity, the global) to fill out what is missing in the
other (fragmentation, the local). Each of these accounts has to take from
the other what it lacks in itself. When Arjun Appadurai, one of the most
acute observers of the global condition, says the central problem of
todays global interactions is the tension between cultural homogenization and cultural heterogenization,39 he is only half-right. The problem
does not lie in the ambiguous character of global events but in the
weakness of concepts that recognize only unity or diversity. The fact is
that the world is both heterogeneous and homogeneous at the same
time. As a result, the greatest difficulty we face in trying to understand
the global age is not its dizzying speed of information transfer nor the
new mobility of people and things. It is instead our ongoing attempt to
understand these developments through the tired philosophical problem of the one and many.
71
The multiple is the central structural feature of the multimediated

global environment because globalization in all its various manifestations economic, political, cultural produces the kind of multidimensional experience Glenn Gould discovered. We find ourselves
physically present in one situation and at the same time involved in
several others. We live in sets, groups, crowds, and wholes that, like
Michel Serress flock of screaming birds, are transformed by the movement among the things they unite. If that is true, then Glenn Gould sitting at his piano, pulling through the noise of the piano and TV, is a
better icon of the global age than the schizophrenic isolated by flat, disconnected words.
NOTES
1 Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1990).
2 You can listen to a sample of the symphony at http://www.flong.com/
telesymphony.
3 Available at http://www.dogme95.dk.
4 Michel Serres, Genesis (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 2.
5 Ibid., 5.
6 Ibid.
7 For Bergsons theory of multiplicity, see Time and Free Will: An Essay on the
Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson (London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1972), chap. 2, on continuous and discrete multiplicities.
Deleuzes most important texts on multiplicity include Bergsonism, trans.
Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Zone Books, 1988), 3847; Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 89, 24552, 4828; Gilles Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1994), 18291; and the lecture Theory of Multiplicities in Bergson,
http://www.webdeleuze.com/TXT/ENG/bergson.html. Serress most
important text on multiplicity is Genesis, but the idea is developed in many
of his other books, including The Troubadour of Knowledge (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991), and Rome: The Book of Foundations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992).
8 Serres, Genesis, 7.
9 Michel Chion, AudioVision: Sound on Screen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
10 Glenn Gould, The Medium and the Message: An Encounter with Marshall
72
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
Stephen Crocker
McLuhan, in The Art of Glenn Gould: Reflections of a Musical Genius, ed. John
P.L. Roberts (Toronto: Malcolm Lester Books, 1999), 246.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York:
Signet Books, 1964), 25.
For a good overview of the history of sound aesthetics in the twentieth century, see Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
Don Ihde discusses this experiment in Listening and Voice: A Phenomenology
of Sound (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976).
For a good account of Wagners efforts to tame noise and distraction, see
Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 247ff.
Luigi Russolo, The Art of Noises, originally published as a booklet on
11 July 1913. The Niuean Pop Cultural Archive, http://www.unknown.nu/
futurism/noises.html.
Ibid.
Katherine Hayles, How We Became PostHuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics,
Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999),
207ff.
Walter Murch, foreword to Chion, AudioVision.
See Walter Murch, Stretching Sound to Help the Mind See, New York Times,
1 October 2000.
See Fredric Jameson, Totality as Conspiracy, in The Geo-Political Aesthetic:
Cinema and the World System (London: British Film Institute, 1992).
Todd Gitlin, Media Unlimited: How the Torrent of Media and Sounds Overwhelms Our Lives (New York: Henry Holt, 2001).
Michel Serres, The Art of Living Michel Serres, interview by Mary
Zurzani, in Hope: New Philosophies for Change (Sydney: Pluto Press, 2002),
201.
Louis Menand, The Talk of the Town, New Yorker, 2 July 2001, 21.
See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1961).
See Ihde, Listening and Voice.
For a lucid discussion of these points, see McLuhans interview with Playboy
magazine, Marshall McLuhan A Candid Conversation with the High
Priest of Popcult and Metaphysician of Media, in The Essential McLuhan, ed.
Eric McLuhan and Frank Zingrone (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 1995),
23369; see also The Extensions of Man; and The Medium Is the Message: An
Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam Books, 1967).
Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (London: Grafton Books, 1927), 35.
73
28 Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1911), chap. 1.
29 Chion, AudioVision, 2634.
30 Susan Sontag, The Basic Unit of Contemporary Art Is Not the Idea, but the
Analysis of and Extension of Sensations, in McLuhan: Hot and Cool, ed. Gerald Emmanuel Stearn (New York: Signet Books, 1967), 24958.
31 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 88.
32 For an excellent analysis of these points, see Daniel W. Smith, Deleuzes
Theory of Sensation: Overcoming the Kantian Duality, in Deleuze: A Critical
Reader, ed. Paul Patton (New York: Routledge, 1997), 2958.
33 Woolf, To the Lighthouse, 20.
34 Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotexte, 1987); Jean-Franois
Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).
35 Lyotard, Postmodern Condition, 39.
36 Jameson, Postmodernism, 27.
37 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 32.
38 Serres, Genesis, 131.
39 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 32.
3 The Networked Screen: Moving Images,

Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Size
ha idee was son
However moving images are conceived as institution, experience, or

aesthetic their past and present are unthinkable without screens.
Large or small, made of cloth or liquid crystals, screens provide a primary interface between the forms and inhabitants that constitute visual
culture. Animated by celluloid, electronic, and digital sources, these
interfaces broker the increasing presence of moving images in private
and public life: museums and galleries, stock exchanges, airplane seats,
subways, banks, food courts, record stores, gas stations, office desks,
and even the palm of ones hand. Some screens emit light and some
reflect it; some are stationary and others mobile. Variations abound.
But, one thing is certain: contemporary culture is host to more screens
in more places than ever before.1
In film studies, scholars have addressed the proliferation of images
and screens largely by tending to the ways in which cinema is more
malleable than previously understood, appearing everywhere, transforming across varied media and sites of consumption. The dominant
metaphors used to discuss the multiplication of screens and the images
that fill them have been metaphors of variability, ephemerality, dematerialization, or cross-platform compatibility, wherein screens are reconceptualized as windows that shrink and expand on cue. Scholars use
terms like content, morphing, and themed entertainment to identify the many modes by which moving images are produced and also
distributed and seen.2 Even within the industry, films are commonly
thought of not as objects or discrete texts but as flows of images and
sounds that can be reconfigured and merchandised across a range of
commodity forms.3 Richard Maltby has persuasively promoted the
concept of cinema as software.4 Not only does it accurately reflect
Moving Images, Materiality, and the Aesthetics of Size
75
industry idioms; it reminds us that the critical terms we employ to

understand Hollywoods mode of production must adjust to the multimedia entertainment conglomerates that dominate the field of movingimage production, distribution, and exhibition. SKG, Vivendi-Universal, and Viacom know very well that a movie is never just a film. It is
also a soundtrack CD, a lunchbox, a baseball hat, a videogame, a cable
program, an action figure, and a DVD. The film industry is thoroughly
integrated around this basic fact, as are the millions of people who
watch, play, rewind, pause, download, listen to, collect, and otherwise
interact with cinema.
Against claims to the contrary, cinema scholars must do even more to
integrate into their critical frameworks the multimediated environment
that is clearly forcing a new definition of cinema.5 We can no longer
retain films monopoly on our understanding of cinema in particular
or moving-image culture more generally. Neither celluloid, movie theatres, nor modernist ideas about art adequately account for the dynamic
shifts ushered in by media culture in the last two decades. Two obvious
examples of these shifts are: (1) the prominence of digital production
processes in the form of special effects and (2) televisions primacy as
exhibition mode for movies. Both indicate the undeniable interpenetration of film with other technologies and media forms.6 In other words,
as the material, corporate, and technological conditions of cinemas production and exhibition transform, those tasked with understanding
these changes must reorient their conceptual tools. This basic assertion
applies to the analysis of both the past and the present of moving-image
dynamics.
In the context of film studies, metaphors foregrounding malleability,
such as Maltbys software, and companion metaphors emphasizing
mobility, such as Anne Friedbergs mobilized gaze, have functioned
productively to loosen a constraining dependency on medium specificity and to weaken attempts to preserve an ever-elusive idea about
cinematic purity and essence.7 Unravelling the discrete film object into
debates about its relations to urban life, modern leisure, and ascendant
consumerism has expanded and enriched the field, sending film scholars towards cultural, media, television, and visual studies, as well as
sociology and political economy.8 New ideas about history have further shaped an expanded idea about cinema.9 Collectively such work
has necessarily shifted our understanding of cinema away from a
sacred and finite text towards an expanded system of overlapping
relations, one that bears close relation both to emergent and global
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Haidee Wasson
media conglomerates as well as to everyday life and other media

forms. Yet, metaphors foregrounding the flows and mobilities of contemporary visual culture can also obscure new formations of material
and contextual specificity. Alongside the everywhere and everywhen
of current cinema, moving images also touch down at identifiable
moments and in particular places. These points become plainly visible
at the interface marked by screens. It is these screens, clearly integral
to the architecture of powerful institutions corporate, urban, and
domestic that shape, delimit, and also enable our encounter with
moving images. Exploring the currents of contemporary visual culture
requires us to consider the attendant specificities of these screens and
of the networks that link them. By setting aside questions of medium
specificity, this chapter explores the concept of the networked screen,
suggesting its formative role in transforming celluloid, electronic, and
digital images into differentiated social and material sites of cultural
engagement.
Screens are nodes in complex networks. They indicate a moment of
performance when otherwise indistinguishable inscriptions whether
composed of chemical and light or code and cable become an encounter between a viewer and an intelligible image. These encounters can,
of course, occur in the context of screens that are both permanent and
impermanent. Artists and corporations alike employ a range of screens
that can last no longer than the moment of the performance: bodies,
trees, paintings, shop windows, sidewalks, buildings. Any object flat or
not can in practice be turned into a screen. Yet, the vast majority of the
screens we encounter do not disappear with the images that flutter
across them. They endure through time. Sitting on desks, mounted on
walls, encased by metal, glass, and plastic, they have a comparative stability. Moreover, screens persistently and actively shape the images
they yield and the experience of those who watch and listen to them.
Screens are not autonomous forces but intimate consorts of specific
material and institutional networks. Their shape, size, control buttons,
and positioning reflect the logics of the systems and structures that produce and sustain them.
My argument borrows from the recent work in film studies that foregrounds the material, discursive, and institutional life of cinema.10 It
also draws upon models that assert the crucial role of site-specificity
when investigating a pervasive medium like television, elegantly put
forth by Anna McCarthy in her recent book Ambient Television.11 In what
follows, I address the networked screen by exploring two of the many
77
circuits through which images presently travel, the environments in

which they appear, and the screens that frame them: QuickTime and
IMAX. I am concerned here, to borrow a phrase from Vivian Sobchack,
with describing, thematizing, and interpreting the structures of lived
spatiality, temporality, and meaning at the site of particular and qualitatively different kinds of screens.12 I would like to suggest, as a counterbalance to a focus on meta-structures and new languages the loop,
the malleable, and infinitely expandable that it is still useful to think
about the frequently specific, directed, constrained, and deliberate
modes by which emergent configurations of moving images circulate
and become visible on particular kinds of screens.
To be sure, movies as moving images and as objects have long
been a part of temporally and spatially specific material networks. This
includes shipping methods such as film canisters and mail, or modes
of transport like boats, trains, planes, or even airwaves. Each of these
methods and modes is an integral part of cinemas history. Each in
some way made individual films into the amorphous and powerful
institution we call cinema. Distribution and exhibition networks shape
the cultural life of any given film or group of films, sending cameras
but also spreading their products images over vast expanses of geographic space and time, linking centre to periphery, then to now. In
other words, technologies of distribution and exhibition constitute key
elements of the ideological circuits in which moving images have long
travelled, through which they have been thought about, and how they
have come to look. This fact implicates films necessarily in highly rationalized and also makeshift networks, ranging from mail systems, trade
borders, and global transportation grids to newspaper swap pages and
clandestine exchanges among private collectors. Moreover, such transit
routes have shaped not just the cultural life and ideological significance
of particular films but also have left behind their own kinds of physical
inscriptions, indicating the clear interrelations among cinema as object
(film cans, videocassettes, and DVDs), cinema as screened aesthetic
(expansive vistas, close-ups, endless outtakes, and production trivia),
and cinema as system of distribution and exhibition (movie theatres,
televisions, computers).
To illustrate, consider pre-video, non-35-mm film gauges. For example, the standardization of the 16-mm film gauge in 1923 and its exclusive use of acetate film stock was a deliberate attempt to increase the
portability and marketability of films outside of movie theatres.13 With
non-flammable, small-gauge celluloid, films could be sent in lighter
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Haidee Wasson
canisters. They were smaller and weighed less. Print and shipping costs
diminished. Libraries, film clubs, collectors, and middle-class homes
began to buy and also store films in their libraries, on bookshelves, and
in their parlours. The spread of home cinemas was spurred even further
with the introduction of 8 mm films and equipment in 1932. In other
words, making films smaller, less expensive, and easier to ship was a
key factor, albeit one of many, in increasing the viability of non-theatrical film exhibition and the transformation of cinema into a collection of
material objects suited to widespread consumption outside of movie
theatres. Films-as-objects literally changed shape as did the routes they
travelled; the number of spaces in which films could be seen also
increased. As these small films found new life in, among other places,
middle-class homes, their aesthetic specificity became apparent. Qualitatively different from their theatrical counterparts, the non-theatrical
and domestic moving image was smaller, and over time and repeated
use, became scratched, discoloured, and faded. Because 16 mm and
later 8 mm films were also viewed on a range of consumer-oriented,
small-space screens, their projection enacted notably different dynamics of light and size than cinemas dominant mode of exhibition in
movie theatres. In short, the experience of cinema was expanded by the
consumer imperatives of small films and screens. Thus from the 1920s
onward, small screens articulated cinema to the politics and dynamics
of domestic institutions as well as those of public entertainment.14
Similarly, the technology of television transformed moving images
previously secured on celluloid into broadcast signals sent through the
air, dematerializing and rematerializing them on small pieces of household furniture. Films made using the academy frame ratio (1.33:1) fit
the television screen but were irretrievably altered by their travels,
appearing grainy, wavy, and blurry compared to their theatrical runs.
As televisions small screen spread throughout the 1950s, theatrical
movie screens grew larger. The original dimensions of the classical
Hollywood frame changed to suit the emergent widescreen formats of
1950s movie theatres (ranging from 1.66:1 to 2.55:1). As these wider
films were eventually translated back to the television screen they were
altered even more dramatically, reshaped as well as recoloured, reedited, submitted to pan and scan and other cropping techniques, interspersed with commercials, and seen on much smaller screens of a notably different shape in living rooms.15 To be sure, television transformed
the conditions in which we watch moving pictures, irrevocably influencing film aesthetics along the way. As television occupied an increas-
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ingly important role for industry and audience as an exhibition outlet

for films, producers and directors began to make films that were more
friendly to television screens, using what are termed safe zones, effectively employing less of the film frames width and concentrating
action in the centre of the image. In more recent years, consumers have
also developed their own cinema hierarchies which acknowledge televisions centrality in moving-image culture. Certain films become renters while others draw us into the theatre. Some we buy so that we can
watch them over and over again. From production to exhibition, film
culture is currently unimaginable without television.
More recent changes in technologies of image distribution such as
VHS and DVD, while largely dependent on television screens for image
display, have introduced their own changes. Both have made it commonsense that buying movies, rather than renting a seat in a movie
theatre, can be part of a days shopping. They may be purchased inexpensively and carried in shopping bags with other commodities. DVDs
can now be obtained at movie rental stores, supermarkets, discount
department stores, fast food chains, computer stores, and gas stations.
This phenomenon links movies-as-objects and movies-as-screenedcontent concretely to a wide variety of other kinds of cultural practices:
travel, eating, errands, shopping. As these trends have fundamentally
dispersed cinema across a wide cultural field, they have also reconsolidated a sense of cinematic propriety. VHS and especially DVD have
contributed to a resurgence of sensibilities about cinematic artistry
through institutionalizing and commodifying a range of concepts
aimed at identifying creative agency and originality (e.g., the directors
cut, classics, restorations). These technologies have also served to facilitate the rise of letterboxing, an attempt to reinstate original screen
ratios despite extreme shrinkage from the theatrical screen even
while being translated through technologies other than the properly
cinematic.16 Such changes in technology demonstrate that moving
images have long been part of abstract systems of transport (airwaves,
magnetic tape, digital discs) which have always supported the various
contractions, expansions, and modifications of images themselves.
Whether carried by trucks or fibre optic cables, the packaging (or compression), distribution, and exhibition of moving images is intimately
tied to the material specificities of the networks through which they
travel, their particular technological form, and the specific screens on
which they appear. This fact is crucial for analysing changes to the form
and function of cinema.
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QuickTime
Integrating the material networks of cinema into our critical frameworks is a crucial critical step toward sharpening our scholarly methods in film and media studies. Not only does the networked screen help
us to understand changes germane to the history of film; the concept
also helps us to understand the rapid diversification of moving-image
cultures and practices in the present. For instance, in 1991 Apple Computer introduced yet another possible mode by which moving images
might be distributed to and exhibited on screens. QuickTime is one of
several streaming technologies that allow individual computer screens
to play moving-image files accessible on innumerable Web pages. Not
initially designed for downloading files, QuickTime turns the computer screen into a private, on-demand playback system, providing a
platform that links the click of a mouse to thousands of short movies
that remain on their host sites. There are many genres of Web-streamed
films, including experimental and artist-designed pieces, media-savvy
parodies, narrative and non-narrative shorts, and commercial film trailers. These movies can be found on websites dedicated solely to making
such films available17 or may be found on sub-sites of larger institutions.18 Yet, despite the range of qualitatively different organizations
and films, there are several features these movies tend to share, largely
because of their like modes of distribution and exhibition. These films
appear grainy, jerky, flat. Colour is washed. Focus is shallow. Background detail is lost and blurred to abstraction; foreground details also
frequently appear fuzzy. Fast movements are likewise indistinct. These
movies are almost always rectangular (though occasionally square),
mimicking cinemas widescreen ratio. They rely heavily on sound and
music, yet often forego the tight coordination required for synchronized sound, particularly in the form of dialogue. Moreover, one must
also note that each of these characteristics clarity, rhythm, and synchronization also depends on the media reader you use, the processing speed of your computer, and the nature of your connection to the
Web. Also important to emphasize is that these images appear differently, depending on the time of day they are viewed, other traffic on the
Web, and your server and bandwidth. And, of course, they are really,
really small, frequently no bigger than two to three inches wide,
dwarfed even by the diminutive desktop, laptop, or hand-held screens
on which they appear.
With their own aesthetic specificities, streamed movies imply and,
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indeed, rely upon images that are connected as much to their original
pro-filmic event as to the modes by which they are disseminated and
seen. In short, little Web movies announce their aesthetic interpenetration and dependence upon their mode of transport. These movies are a
clear shift away from a material set of images and sounds secured on
celluloid as an object in a film can (an object with relative endurance)
toward a sequence of images and sounds that are bound irretrievably to
the systems and the logics of a particular kind of technological traffic.
This traffic does not, as with celluloid or DVD, involve shipping images
from one location to another, their original material status relatively
intact. Indeed, this kind of traffic shares far more with broadcasting
than with the distribution models conventionally attached to the cinema proper. Both are greatly affected by the environments in which
they circulate. More than this, QuickTime provides a distinct kind of
network, consisting of code, digital and analogue networks, servers,
Web browsers, media players, and microprocessors that each play a
role in how precisely the information that will eventually yield a moving image will look and what the price of admission will be (i.e., the
cost of up-to-date computer equipment, broadband connections, and so
on).19
One way to understand some of the changes digital technologies
have brought to moving-image culture is to think about the ways in
which streamed Web films index a distinct kind of networked cinema.
Streamed Web films relay an identifiable emergent aesthetic that is
dependent on overlapping and constantly interacting systems of
motion and variability. Streaming cinema offers moving images that are
themselves constantly changing because of the fitful networks of which
they are a part and on which they wholly depend. QuickTime movies
announce variation and unpredictability.20 They resolutely reject or
perhaps make a mockery of realist conventions of cinematic perfection
and of the idea of pristine, invariable film texts. They achieve this with
a vaguely cinematic and miniature frame littered with user controls:
pause, fast forward, and play buttons, time and control bars, browser
icons, indicators of connection speed, and memory remainders.
The small size and the jerky, grainy qualities of moving-image texts
are not new to visual culture. Early photography and motion pictures
underwent similar phases. Indeed, rejecting our recent frenzy for the
new, little Web movies resonate so much with early cinema and Edisons peepshow Kinetoscope that they have been characterized as
quaint and nostalgic.21 Yet the specificities of Web movies do not
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require that they be understood as a good, bad, failed, long-gone, or a

substandard form of conventional realist cinema. One might think of
them as a fully realized yet ephemeral form, borrowing much more
from visual technologies other than the explicitly cinematic: handheld
optical toys, live teleplays, radio concerts, as well as graphic design. It is
also important to note that their smallness and their intimacy are obviously not the only articulations of the technology. QuickTime is simply
a program that can be used in many ways. For instance, I frequently
stream films into my classrooms for students to consider. There are
qualitative changes to their appearance, in part because a qualitatively
different technological and institutional network makes them visible.
No longer minuscule and addressed to a single, controlling spectator,
QuickTime becomes part of an educational institutional apparatus but
also a more public, audience-based one. The technology itself (a larger
screen and data projector), for instance, is only one part of a larger educational and authoritative dynamic. In this latter example it becomes
co-articulated with syllabi, textbooks, tests, instructor pedagogy, and so
on.22 Against the idea that QuickTime is quaint and nostalgic, I would
like to suggest that the networked screen implied by streamed movies
presents us with two important points of entry into contemporary
media culture: (1) they are an emergent configuration of cinematic institutions which includes websites but also browsers and servers that offer
distinct rearticulations of cinema, and (2) inasmuch as we can isolate
these little films from the texts, controls, and marks of their corporate
environment, they also invite a particular way of looking, one that has
a complex and reciprocal relationship with ways of engaging with
images not generally associated with cinema. To be sure, this way of
looking is considerably different from that circumscribed by dominant
Hollywood aesthetics or theatrical modes of exhibition. QuickTime
links moving images commercial and not to visual forms previously
confined to the experimental, artistic, and domestic realms: small
screens, unstable images and sounds, and a hyper-sensitivity to temporal networks that are distinct from cinemas conventional 24-frames per
second.23 Further, it brands these images, with an already branded computer screen, browser interface, and operating system, with its own
QuickTime logo and proprietary design. You always know you are
watching QuickTime. Counter-intuitively, these characteristics are most
commonly combined with utterly conventional cinematic styles, thus
distorting familiar aesthetic techniques and images, while also displaying their own specificity. Moreover, Web films are contained by a very
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small box, requiring attention to the effects not only of scale distortion
but also of frame size. I will return to explore this further.
IMAX
In sharp contrast to the small size of QuickTime is the bold monumentalism of IMAX. Like QuickTime, IMAX is a distinct network devoted
to showing moving images, similarly bearing the marks of its own technological specificity and institutions. IMAX technology comes with its
own camera, celluloid, release schedules, projection system, and
screens. Rather than browsers, servers, operating systems, and computer manufacturers, IMAX has long been connected with museums,
scientific organizations, tourism, and, more recently, grand entertainment complexes. Like QuickTime, IMAX is an imaging system that
operates at one remove from Hollywood cinema. Both are relatively
recent additions to visual culture, serving as highly visible elements of
emergent screenscapes. Yet, notably different from little Web movies
and their quaint intimacy and variation is the pronounced precision,
clarity, and size of IMAX. Whereas QuickTime engages an individualized user, IMAX declares itself to a global audience.
IMAX originated in a large multi-screen experiment at Montreals
Expo 67, called Labyrinthe (see Janine Marchessaults chapter in this
volume). IMAX Systems Corporation was founded in 1970. Its first
permanent screen, Cinesphere, was constructed at Ontario Place in
Toronto in 1971. As of January 2005, roughly 240 IMAX screens could
be found in thirty-five countries worldwide.24 IMAX began as a special-venue format and was attached initially to museums and other
educational and tourist sites throughout the 1970s and 1980s. In the
1990s and early 2000s IMAX established closer links with mainstream
exhibition venues such as mall-based theatres and stand-alone megaplexes. Yet, its film library remains dominated by titles that bespeak its
roots in documentary and edutainment films, the most successful of
which are The Dream Is Alive (Graeme Ferguson, 1985), Everest (David
Breashears, 1998), and SpaceStation 3D (Toni Myers, 2002). Two of
these are about space exploration. The third, Everest, documents a
climbing team seeking to ascend the tallest mountain in the world.
IMAX brokers in the spectacle of gigantism. It is the biggest and most
successful large-screen format in the world, its pre-eminence assured
by its recent diversification into current-release Hollywood actionadventure films.25
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IMAXs corporate slogan is Think Big. Despite the oversized camera, large film stock, and expansive subject matter, none of these would
translate as fully without IMAXs colossal screen. Most of these screens
are eight storeys high (24.5 metres [80 feet]) and 30 metres (100 feet)
wide.26 As such, they can accommodate an image almost ten times
larger than a standard theatrical screen, 3,100 times bigger than a
twenty-seven-inch television set, and 192,000 times bigger than a typical QuickTime movie. The screen itself weighs almost eight hundred
pounds. IMAX is notably huge and utterly immobile, a monument to a
longstanding Western preoccupation with technology, vision, and
size.27 Predictably, its subjects enact these predilections. IMAX films
frequently feature large subjects mountains, sea, space weaving thin
narratives with the tropes of spectacular travel. Exotic locations are
accented by slow, sweeping pans, orchestral scores, and suspended
non-diegetic moments of waves crashing, the earth spinning, and
mountains jutting up and away from the infinitesimal marks of civilization. At times, even its unthinkably large screen strains to house the
enormity of its images.
IMAX films are filled with bright colours, deep focus, vertical tilts,
and travelling shots into spaces too big for the eye to fully assess in a
single glance. Aerial glides and panoramic surveys punctuate its
adventures. Steady point-of-view shots accentuate the confident invitation to fly, dive, ski, slide, fall, or simply observe and master space. The
image is unremitting and sure. Movement through mountain crevices
is slow and smooth. Images of flowers, trees, and clouds are rich and
full. Background landscapes and foreground characters are rendered in
sharp detail. There are frequent attempts to emulate motion inward
and outward, from foreground to background, background to foreground. With IMAX you find yourself moving into and out of great
heights and depths, travelling downward to the bottom of the sea or
upward to the stars. Framing and editing tend to reassert the centrality
of the camera/protagonist and thus re-enact one of classical cinemas
standard techniques: spatial and temporal omnipresence. With IMAX,
the camera is everywhere you need it to be at exactly the right moment.
But it is crucial to observe that the meticulous and confident control of
IMAX imagery is in part a compensation for the destabilizing effects of
that sublime invitation to be engulfed by its gigantic images. IMAX
offers certainty through its aesthetic techniques and its standardized
screening spaces, yet it also simultaneously threatens to take this away
with the power of its determined enormity.
The cinematic conventions employed in IMAX films foreground
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techniques that seek to accommodate yet stabilize the gigantism at its

core. This yields a spectacular or exaggerated realism, one that recapitulates Bazins myth of total cinema of images that become rather than
represent the real yet also promises to explode that myth through its
larger-than-life subjects, its supra-natural clarity, and its daunting invitation to a technological sublime.28 IMAX engulfs its spectators,
stretching the limits of human vision through its expansive screen and
immersive aesthetic. Edmund Burkes classic formulation of the sublime becomes useful here, as it describes a mode of representation
characterized by the grandeur and expanse of nature. In this expanse,
according to Burke, there is great beauty but also a powerful, destructive force. The sublime offers simultaneously astonishment and
admiration, wonder and pain. It is both illuminating and terrifying,
underscored by the contradictory appeal of the infinite. Its seductive
force invites surrender to its wonders as well as to its disordered horror.29 IMAX is an encounter with Burkes sublime: the threat and promise of the image overtaking us compels us to look and also to be fearful,
less of what we will see but how we will feel when we see it. In other
words, IMAX stages dramas of scale, characterized by a gigantism that
entails seduction and repulsion, search and loss, aggrandizement and
belittlement. It does this with a certainty a series of declarative gestures informed by a collection of identifiable formal techniques and
institutional controls.
IMAX employs extreme realism to emulate a full-body immersion in
its story, rife with the anxiety integral to its enormity. It is an experience
of bodily thrill facilitated by the eye. IMAX draws as much on narrative, realist conventions as it does on the logics and exaggerations of the
thrill ride. Its aesthetic is one of movement, immersion, and enormity in
which the spectacle of nature is paramount. Further, as Charles Acland
has argued, this construction of cinema as travel is as much about the
spectacle of the technology itself as it is about the thing being depicted.
Just as QuickTime is always in part about QuickTime; IMAX is always
in part about IMAX. The IMAX system is designed for invariability.
This is one reason IMAX leases rather than sells its equipment and the
use of its name, thus allowing tighter control of its network and ensuring that its big images will always satisfy corporate standards. This is
true not only because of its distinct size and conventionalized aesthetic,
but also because the discursive framing of IMAX films and theatres
inevitably calls your attention to the IMAX brand. Introductions to the
technology, displays of the projector, and corporate logos are standard
elements of the experience.30 Regardless of where you have travelled,
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you know that it is always courtesy of IMAXs network of technologies

and institutions. Like QuickTime, IMAX presents us with a kind of
branded cinema, one that explicitly and implicitly bears the marks of its
network. To repeat: the IMAX screen does not simply occupy the theatre; it constitutes the specificity of the viewing experience.
These branded screens differentiate themselves in several ways from
the conventionalized branding of dominant cinema. Yet, considering
the small and the big of screen culture reminds us that all screens now
operate in a comparative field that is always, in part, differentiated by
size. The proliferating screens that constitute our screenscape are both
expanding and contracting, ranging from the diminutive size of a
human iris (evident in the artwork of Pipilotti Rist) to the enormity of
the NASDAQ buildings eight-storey video monitor in New York
City;31 previous dynamics of scale and experience have been dislodged.
Compared with two-by-three-inch Web movies, home televisions seem
monumental. Considered next to the huge IMAX screens, once-spectacular theatrical film screens seem notably diminished.
Importantly, the endurance of screens paired with the flows of
images that fill them enact a dynamic of stasis and motion, effectively
combining still and standardized screens with moving and various
images. The moment of the screened image is the product of this
dynamic pairing, which should be understood as heterogeneous yet
specific. These screens invite us to look in particular ways. Big screens
engage us differently than small ones. Further, because images are
more malleable than most of the screens on which they appear, contemporary screens are frequently host to a particular kind of distortion. We
become witness to the abstractions attendant upon the moment that
screens of an unchanging size display the fluid images which grow or
shrink to fill them. In other words, the pictures that travel across these
screens participate further in a drama of distortion and size. Whether it
be digital video stretched to pixelated distortion on theatrical movie
screens or widescreen features reduced by small television sets, these
transformations provide test cases to explore the limits of image fluidity as well as the specificities of the screened image.
There is perhaps no more telling evidence of the importance of screen
size than a cruel exercise of endurance I like to force upon my students.
I show them an IMAX film preferably Everest in a large auditorium
on a twenty-seven-inch television screen.32 If IMAX-as-IMAX can be
thought of as a meditation on the gigantic, then IMAX-as-TV becomes a
tortured forty-five minutes of trite narration, staid framing, and orien-
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talist thematics. On a television, IMAX films hold no promise of engulfment, enrapture, or seduction. Having shrunk by a factor of over three
thousand, the slow and breathtaking surveys of Everests towering
peaks and deep crevices become stretched, tiresome, and parodic. The
characters are flat (and perhaps clinically pathological). The images are
dull. The drama borders on senseless. The films monumentalism
seems self-indulgent and unappealing. As an aesthetic and an experience, IMAX is made qualitatively different by a small screen; it needs its
giant screen to fully unfurl its own logics. Shrinking its images results
not only in a diminishing sense of awe but also a distorted picture that
consequently clarifies its preoccupations.
Susan Stewarts research can help us to further understand the specificity of IMAXs enormity and QuickTimes smallness. In her book On
Longing, Stewart explores the phenomenology of collectible objects and
their display. With special attention to questions of size, she argues that
the gigantic and the miniature involve a distinct kind of experience for
any given observer. According to her, assessing the phenomenological
dimensions of an observers encounter with objects of varying dimensions serves as a fertile site to consider the interplay of meaning,
materiality, and scale; changes in size determine a particular and
increasingly distorted relation between the conventions of the mark
and its meaning.33 In other words, changes in size augment and subvert
otherwise recognizable images and objects. Analysing the results of this
distortion allows insights into the distinct function of size large,
medium, or small for aesthetic experience. Stewart argues that in the
context of display, size is always about distortion. Both the miniature
and the gigantic thus present themselves as abstractions of knowable
relations between things. In their smallness or their largeness, they distort or abstract our understanding of any given object and carry with
them connotations that further shape their meaning.
According to Stewart, size is relational but also specific; the differences between the miniature and the gigantic are numerous. The latter
incites awe rather than intimacy. It produces a sensation of discomfort
and danger. She writes: The gigantic continually threatens to elude us,
to grow too large for possession by the eye. There is something lush,
profuse, unstoppable in the very idea of the gigantic.34 For Stewart (as
for Burke), the gigantic is most fully articulated by the experience of
something like landscape, which brings us within an immediate and
lived relation to nature as it surrounds us. The parallels to IMAX are
instructive. When we watch IMAX, which frequently features images
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of expansive nature, the images take on their fullest meaning in their

enormity and enveloping size. Watching such images necessarily
involves viewers in a subordinate relation, in which we are reminded of
our relatively minuscule status. As such, we are submitting to the disorder and disproportion presented by any given image, enlarged to
eight storeys. The gigantic image invites us into its exteriority, its gesture outward to the rest of the world. It is akin to the grand gestures of
statehood, monumentalism, and the awe of exploring the unknown.35
The gigantic is not about the individual; it is always beyond this. The
gigantic is similarly not easily contained by a single glance; it can only
be seen in parts. To explore it, one must select a portion of it, move into
it, and thus be further enveloped by it. The gigantic functions as a container, offering its grand vision only to capture us in its labyrinthine
tracks. Because of its overwhelming invitation to surrender, we instinctively watch IMAX with an eye to caution, wary that at any moment it
may overtake us. IMAX may be about the power of the camera to survey everything, but it is simultaneously about our own lack of power to
see as it sees. IMAX augments but also confronts the limits of human
vision.
In contrast to IMAX, streamed Web films are more akin to what Stewart identifies as the miniature. She suggests that miniature objects and
collectibles invite a sense of mastery. We tower above the miniature. We
envelop it, hold it in our hand, survey it all in a quick glance. As
opposed to the gigantic, which promises to contain us, the miniature is
easily contained. We look at little films from a distance rather than with
a sense of being inside of them: To be above, to look down, to take into
the yearning eye more at a single glance: here we are at the very threshold of the lure of the miniature.36 Moreover, little Web films enact the
logic of the private, of the domestic, and of possession. They create a
scenario in which moving images are articulated to individuals who are
largely immobile, frequently squinting, and physically hunched forward. Whereas IMAX spectators can commonly be seen leaning back,
in QuickTime we are invited to lean in.
In their smallness, streamed Web films also convey the constraints of
the highly rationalized and limited systems that yield them. The result
is frequently a degree of distortion and abstraction that leaves us puzzled by the commonly indecipherable nature of what is on the screen.
The tight sense of order and systematicity implied by the geometrical
frame, the buttons, the time bars, and the corporate logos contradicts
the blurred and unpredictable nature of the images inside. The small
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size and consequent abstraction of more familiar realist representational practices provides a further example of Stewarts basic assertion
about the relations between meaning, materiality, and size. Playing
with scale invokes an image that recalls now-distorted cinematic conventions, sending us searching for clues as to what this new form
means. The smallness, the thinness, the flatness of Web films exercise a
kind of cat-and-mouse game with the new user-spectator. Rather than
a cinema of attractions, little Web films suggest what I would like to
call a notably fragmented cinema a cinema of suggestion that calls
attention to its materiality and its status as bound to a tightly integrated network.
Perhaps most important, this cinema of suggestion draws the eye of
the viewer in, closer and closer, exaggerating a sense of interiority
already endemic to the mode by which such images have travelled and
the domestic context in which they are often seen. There are no opportunities to choose ones relationship to the scale of the screen, by choosing a seat in a movie theatre, for instance. Conversely, if one should
choose to control the image by, for instance, enlarging the window in
which it appears on screen, one is faced with increasing abstraction. As
the image strains to fill the screen, it is stretched and becomes meaningful less by what image appears than by the innumerable spaces
between the pixels, paradigmatically transfiguring what we see. The
distended code yields images incompatible with the dominant conventions of the intelligible screen. As Stewart suggests of the miniature
book, the very fact of the miniature object as marker of meaning is an
affront to reason and its principal sense: the eye.37 The miniature
images push our understanding of cinematic convention and our habits
of watching. Paradoxically, enlarging that image alerts us to the material specificities of the little movie and extends the distortion further.
Engaging with streamed Web films is a kind of leap of faith into the limits of the cinematic signifier, as they seek to mimic Hollywood realism
but spiral toward the abstract despite themselves. It is a small cinema
that suggests ownership and depends on fantasies of the private and
the domestic and yet at least for now makes powerful use of the
unseen to establish its visual distinctiveness.
I have initiated a dialogue on the similarities and dissimilarities of
two distinct forms of networked cinema: IMAX and QuickTime. One is
gigantic, the other miniature. One is based on crystal clarity and steady,
declarative images. The other is grainy, jerky, and demur. Taken as dislocated images, their formal properties seem strikingly different. Yet,
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through the concept of the networked screen, their similarities become

apparent. Both exist as apposite to Hollywood cinema. Both bear the
marks of their distinct networks. Each is entangled in a dialogue of control over the image and of looking that implicitly and explicitly engages
but also extends our dominant ideas about watching movies. Both
present emergent examples of specific institutions of cinema. Both suggest the importance of size as one feature of our expanded viewing conditions and call attention to the resulting phenomenologies that evolve
from the little and the big.
I have suggested here that screens elicit dramas of scale, which play
on our sense of proportion, distance, and control (or its loss) in relation
to the images we see. IMAX and Web movies propose, in ways worthy
of further exploration, the importance of the material conditions of distribution, and invite us to think more about the basic fact of networked
films. Computer screens in particular are increasingly integral to emergent modes of cinematic practice. They announce themselves as such.
They are thus a reconfiguration of cinema institutions and aesthetics:
the images they currently yield are uniquely small and unclear yet
omnipresent, suggesting that the metaphor of the network as well as
the size of the screen will over time prove only to be more important
for understanding both the little and the big of film culture.
Widescreen formats, drive-ins, television, IMAX, and the perforated
film screens required for sound projection require us to move away
from our ideas about screens as blank spaces and to think of them more
as part of elaborate technological apparatuses that shape the aesthetics
and experience of cinema. Through dynamics of size, colour, shape,
clarity, and blurred abstraction, screens are not blank frames but active
forces. Moreover, screens take on fuller meaning when understood
alongside the material and institutional conditions that surround and
embolden them. Screens are implicated in identifiable institutional formations and also inextricably linked to multiple systems. Screens, in
other words, are not autonomous sites but windows connected to complex and abstract systems: corporate, aesthetic, and political. As screens
proliferate, it is equally important then to acknowledge the parallel
increase in screen networks. These networks are not new, but their relevance for critically engaging our expanded viewing condition will
only grow as images themselves increasingly become a form of currency in our everyday exchanges. The concept of the networked screen
helps us to better acknowledge the interconnected relations among specific institutions, images, and screens. Moreover, examining particular
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networked screens allows us to avoid the vague assertion that images

are everywhere and thus everywhere the same.
As screens become both bigger and smaller, and images become more
fluid, it is crucial not to lose sight of the persistent forms of materiality
that undergird the meaning and experience of visual forms. Moving
images may be increasingly fluid but their fluidity is not limitless nor
can it be fully understood without recourse to the expanded viewing
contexts and the enduring screens which enable their visibility. Moving
images still largely come to us on screens that are themselves highly
standardized and rationalized products of modern alignments between
industry, science, and consumerism. These alignments continue to be
refigured in countless ways across a range of local and global formations. Some of these involve a reconsolidation of familiar forces; some
do not. But in order to understand these expanded viewing contexts we
need analytic tools to help slice through the perpetual motion and endless flow. The networked screen is one such concept, linking screens to
the larger and frequently amorphous ideas and practices that constitute
them, and to the material contexts in which such screens connect viewer
to image, user to screen, and spectator to spectacle.
NOTES
1 I am indebted to Will Straws brief but suggestive essay on these themes,
Proliferating Screens, Screen 41, no. 1 (2000): 11519. Straw draws attention
not just to the proliferation of screens but to the importance of addressing
the material products of film culture that have accompanied cinemas dispersion through digital networks and satellite systems.
2 See, for examples, Vivian Sobchack, ed., Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick-Change (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000); Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2001); Constance Balides, Jurassic Post-Fordism: Tall Tales of
Economics in the Theme Park, Screen 41, no. 2 (2000): 13960.
3 At the Society for Cinema Studies meeting in Denver 2002, Lev Manovich
asserted that in the face of such changes we need to reorganize the discipline away from film studies, media studies, or visual studies to what
he calls software studies.
4 Richard Maltby, Nobody Knows Everything: Post-Classical Historiographies and Consolidated Entertainment, in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema,
ed. Steve Neale and Murray Smith (London: Routledge, 1998), 2144.
92
Haidee Wasson
5 Among those voicing such claims, David Bordwell is perhaps the best
known. See David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 6th ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002); and David Bordwell, On the
History of Film Style (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
6 The New York Times recently reported that 58 per cent of Hollywoods
income in 2002 came from home video sales, more than twice as much as
box-office revenue. Within home sales, DVD ranks as the most profitable
and fastest-growing revenue generator. At some studios, executives in
charge of home sales approve films for production because of the primary
role home and soon DVD sales have in the market. David D. Kirkpatrick,
Action-Hungry DVD Fans Sway Hollywood, New York Times, 17 August
2003, 1.
7 Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1993).
8 Lauren Rabinovitz, For the Love of Pleasure: Women, Movies, and Culture in
Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1998); Vanessa Schwartz and Leo Charney, eds, Cinema and the Invention of
Modern Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Tom Gunning, Phantom Images and Modern Manifestations: Spirit Photography,
Magic Theater, Trick Films, and Photographys Uncanny, in Fugitive
Images, ed. Patrice Petro (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1995),
4271.
9 For exemplary work that also synthesizes trends in film historiography, see
Barbara Klinger, Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering
the Past in Reception Studies, Screen 38, no. 2 (Summer 1997): 10728.
10 John Belton, Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1992); Barbara Klinger, The New Media Aristocrats: Home Theater
and Domestic Film Experience, Velvet Light Trap 42 (fall 1998): 419; William Paul, Screening Space: Architecture, Technology, and the Motion Picture Screen, in The Movies: Texts, Receptions, Exposures, ed. Laurence
Goldstein and Ira Konigsberg (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1996), 24474.
11 Anna McCarthy, Ambient Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2001).
12 Vivian Sobchack, The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic Presence, in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1994), 87. While I take inspiration from Sobchacks work, my scope is by no
means as ambitious. Whereas Sobchack explores a phenomenology of the
cinema and other visual media (photography, video), I am committed to
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
93
investigating the more specific and materially grounded site of specific

screens rather than media per se.
Non-flammable film was in use in other home film systems as early as 1912.
For more on the history of film technology and the home and amateur
fields, see Patricia Zimmerman, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur
Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), especially chap. 2.
Any casual glance at a Kodak catalogue from the period will demonstrate a
surprising range of screens designed to accommodate such images, including screens that doubled as card tables as well as rear projection units the
size of a small television. It is also clear that the 16 mm format and changing
markets for film effected changes in content. Kodak edited its features and
shorts to make them fit efficiently into a minimal number of film cans and to
eliminate possibly offensive scenes or images. See Ben Singer, Early Home
Cinema and the Edison Home Projecting Kinetoscope, Film History 2 (1988):
3769.
For examples of debates spurred by such transformations, see Charles
Acland, Tampering with the Inventory: Colorization and Popular Histories, Wide Angle 12, no. 2 (April 1990): 1220. For an overview of changing
film formats, production techniques, and aesthetic strategies adopted by the
film industry in the context of changing screen formats and the importance
of television as an exhibition outlet, see Belton, Widescreen Cinema, especially chap. 10, The Shape of Money. For a speculative consideration of the
effects of theatre size and also screen size on Hollywoods changing style,
see Paul, Screening Space.
For a cogent analysis of recent changes in the discursive shaping of new
technologies of cinema in the home, see Barbara Klinger, The Contemporary Cinephile: Film Collecting in the Post-Video Era, in Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinema Audiences, ed. Melvyn Stokes and
Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 2001), 13251. See also
Beyond the Multiplex: Cinema, New Technologies, and the Home (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2006).
E.g., IFILM (http://www.ifilm.com/) and ATOM Films (http://atomfilms.
shockwave.com/af/home/). See also YouTube (http://youtube.com).
A few prominent examples of high-traffic websites include BMW Films and
the Whitney giftcard site.
Manovich makes a similar point. See The Language of New Media, esp. chap.
6.
As with all discussions of recent or emergent technologies, the phenomena
change rapidly. At the time of writing, previously streamed Web movies are
now migrating to DVD. See, for instance, George Lucas in Love (Joe Nuss-
94
21
22
23
24
25
Haidee Wasson
baum, 1999), packaged along with other Web shorts, available through
Amazon.com.
See Vivian Sobchack, Nostalgia for a Digital Object: Regrets on the Quickening of QuickTime, Millennium Film Journal 34 (winter 2000): 423. See also
Lev Manovich, Little Movies: Prolegomena for Digital Cinema, http://
www.manovich.net/little-movies. (I would suggest that these are thoughtful though extremely partial renderings of the form. As it has aged, QuickTime has ushered in as many innovative, self-consciously hi-tech, and
aggressively corporate forms as it has expressed a kind of quaint and nostalgic yearning for cinemas past.)
QuickTime also functions as a computer-based media player, allowing moving images to be downloaded fully as complete files and then played at the
discretion of the computer user. I will not explicitly address this particular
use of QuickTime. But I would like to suggest that it would require a somewhat modified analytic terminology. As distinct from the streaming capacities of QuickTime, downloading and storing such movies affords the user
increased individual control. While computer speed and video cards maintain relevance, Internet traffic does not. This diminishes but does not eliminate variations in play speed.
Vivian Sobchack has articulated the rich links between QuickTime and the
work of Joseph Cornell. See Sobchack, Nostalgia for a Digital Object. There
are productive links between Web films and fluxus, in particular the films
produced through this movement and the subgenre of mail art. Both flux
films and mail art were particularly attuned to the question of time, to
loops, networks, institutions, and to the materiality of aesthetic forms. See
Craig J. Saper, Networked Art (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2001); Michael Crane and Mary Stofflet, eds, Correspondence Art: Source Book
for the Network of International Postal Art Activity (San Francisco: Contemporary Arts Press, 1984); Bruce Jenkins, Flux Films in Three False Starts, in In
The Spirit of Fluxus, ed. Elizabeth Armstrong, Joan Rothfuss, and Simon
Anderson (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1993), 12437.
IMAX Inc. reports that 60 per cent of these screens are in North America,
and approximately 50 per cent are in museums, planetariums and maritime
centers. The other 50 per cent are in commercial theatre complexes. See
http://www.imax.com/ for more corporate information.
This includes films such as Polar Express (2004), Spiderman 2 (2004), The
Matrix Reloaded (2003), and Star Wars: Episode One The Phantom Menace
(1999). IMAX has aggressively sought relationships with Hollywood distributors in order to expand beyond its educational and exploration titles
and to insert IMAX into the commonsense of everyday film culture.
95
26 There is some indication the IMAX screens will actually get bigger. A recent
addition to Sydney, Australia, is 96.9 feet (29.5 metres/ten storeys) high.
27 For a persuasive analysis of IMAX that extends this line of thinking to
include the relations between IMAX, knowledge, and vision, emphasizing
its imperialist tropes, see Charles Acland, IMAX Technology and the Tourist Gaze, Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (1998): 42945.
28 Andr Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1967).
29 Edmund Burke, in an essay called A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin
of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).
30 For more on IMAX, see Charles Acland, IMAX in Canadian Cinema: Geographic Transformation and Discourses of Nationhood, Studies in Cultures,
Organizations, and Society 3 (1997): 289305.
31 Plugged in on 29 December 1999, NASDAQs video screen at Times Square
was heralded as the largest and most expensive video screen in the world.
At a cost of $37 million, the 8,400 LED panels were designed to endow the
electronic stock exchange with a physical presence that it otherwise lacked.
The sign is used to display market information and advertisements.
32 Everest is the most profitable IMAX movie. It is also in many ways prototypical, documenting not just a journey to the peak of the highest mountain,
but also the journey of the biggest camera up the biggest mountain. This
journey is, of course, underwritten by numerous American museums and
scientific foundations. The camera was carried by local Sherpas. The imperialism of IMAX as gaze but also as a mode of production is transparent.
33 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 38.
34 Ibid., 129.
35 Ibid., xii.
36 Ibid., 131.
37 Ibid., 40.
4 The Iterative Circle: Transformation of Web

Narrative in Amika
sheila petty
The power differential created by Western-dominated technologys colonization of global cyberspace raises justified disquiet.1 Even the evolution of such global conventions as the basic desktop interface can have
a profoundly chilling effect on the rise of innovative ways of conceiving
points of contact with computer technology.2 Pierre Lvy suggests that
some types of cultural representations will have difficulties surviving,
or even coming into being, in environments lacking certain intellectual
technologies, while they may prosper in other cognitive societies.3
Thus, in some circles, the changes wrought by computer technology are
considered seriously detrimental and capable of eradicating or eroding
existing representations of oral traditions or other modes of expression
not rooted in Western precepts. The rise of a virtual global culture
seems inevitable to theorists such as Lvy, who acknowledges the brutality of cultural destabilization but insists that such negative outcomes should not prevent us from recognizing the most socially
positive forms now emerging.4 Based on the Western assumption that
such advances necessarily outweigh the losses that might occur,
Lvys position underscores the very real imperialist threat posed by
computer-based forms.
Such concerns are leading to a polarized debate in which the reaction to emerging technologies is usually and simplistically divided
along a horizontal axis of paranoid technophobia versus an enthusiastic endorsement of the revolutionary powers of innovation.5 Such
anxiety can be attributed to what Michael Heim has referred to as the
collision of the tectonic plates of culture, which occurs when a new
and revolutionary technology arises and subsumes old forms within it.6
Added to this is a growing sense that computer-based narratives are
Transformation of Web Narrative in Amika 97
inherently Westocentric because the technology is largely developed in

the West, a concern registered by Teshome Gabriel and Fabian Wagmister when they note that the Third World will ultimately have no choice
but to adapt technologies produced in decidedly different cultures in
an effort to prevent them from simply overwhelming or dominating
traditional ways.7 This concern has serious implications for questions
of representation of cultures outside of Eurocentric milieus. Can a Web
product, conceived in a power structure that is undeniably imperialistic, and where the very question of equal access is problematic, be truly
evocative of local cultural imperatives?
In fact, it is problematic to regard the colonization of the Web by
Westocentric cultural standards as a purely monolithic and inevitable
process. The cultural imperialism thesis is unable to facilitate the textual analysis of locally produced Web narratives except as Westocentric
clones or points of resistance against the colonizing tide of Westocentric
Web forms. Such binaries risk deprecating local cultural imperatives
for, although resistance may figure in the creation of an indigenous
work, it is seldom the sole rationale for its existence. Sean Cubitt has
posed a counter-argument to the cultural imperialism thesis by suggesting that there can be no translational culture in which products
arise that are not specific to the cultural ecology in which they occur: a
song, a website, mean one thing here and another there, one thing now
and another then.8 Thus, in Cubitts view, translation of Westocentric
standards by local cultures disintegrates translation and conservation
in favour of openness, questioning, and ephemerality.9 From this position, it is possible to open a dialogue on form in which local preoccupations challenge colonizing imperatives by ignoring them all together in
favour of pursuing Web narrative forms based on precepts different
from those underscoring Westocentric standards. This is certainly the
case in cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, where the process of adapting,
and ultimately transforming, Westocentric technologies to local concerns is well established. Africa has a longstanding track record in
terms of transforming Western communication technology to meet
local concerns. For example, the rise of sub-Saharan cinema in the late
1950s and 1960s led to the development of unique cinematic and narrative conventions based on concepts of oral tradition and social space
that allowed filmmakers to use this technology meaningfully as a voice
of and for the people.10 In addition, although it may be argued that
television is not a product of African countries normal development,
nor does it belong to Africas histories, sub-Saharan Africans have nev-
98
Sheila Petty
ertheless been very successful in creating specialized serial narratives

that combine education and drama.11 These successes suggest that
what is at play here is something beyond the origin of a technology:
once the technology has entered into a new context, it is possible to
effectively mould it to suit new cultural purposes and means of expression. Hence, it may be argued that sub-Saharan African artists will
bring a similar approach to computer-based narrative forms despite the
Westocentric foundation of the technology. Given this framework, this
chapter intends to explore the Senegalese Web-based narrative, Amika
(Ndary L, Massamba Mbaye, Moussa Tine, and Madick Seck, 1999)
as an exemplar of early African interactive narrative form and consider
the implications of its aesthetic and narrative presentation on Dakar
Web.12 As one of the first Web narratives undertaken by Senegalese artists, Amika demonstrates how existing narrative strategies and aesthetic
constructs can be adapted to new media contexts. In particular, the
chapter will examine how Amika uses the specific aesthetic structures of
space, time, and oral tradition as a means of expressing uniquely African cultures and identities.
The lack of economic wherewithal to support information and communication technology (ICT) has created what has been described as a
digital divide between Africa and other technologically advanced
developed countries. As the members of the controversial New Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD) observe, Africas inadequate ICT infrastructure is made less functional by a shortage of human
resources and lack of effective policy and regulatory frameworks.13
This has led to inadequate access to affordable telephones, broadcasting, computers and the Internet. African teledensity remains below one
line per 100 people.14 In addition, high service and connection costs
place this technology beyond the range of most potential users.15 These
conditions result in Africas continued limited participation and access
to information-based technologies and economies. This lack of access
and infrastructure potentially has serious repercussions. For example,
the absence of effective voice in the area of ICTs means that many decisions that impact on the African continent ... are taken in distant capitals and in global institutions without adequate input from these
nations.16 In addition, the lack of resources results in a brain drain in
which Africas digital leadership will migrate to more developed
regions.17 Finally, such obstacles lead to a justified concern with dedicating scarce funds on new and unfamiliar technologies when needs
for basic services such as fresh water and classrooms are not yet met.18
Transformation of Web Narrative in Amika 99
This paradoxical struggle between colliding imperatives is underscored by Moudjibath Daouda, who suggests that the development of
the Internet in Africa presents conflicting terms: on the one hand is
Africa the consumer, whose dependence on technology produced by
the West is a continuance of colonial legacies; on the other is the real
possibility for development of the continent by African regional integration and expansion of African products and services into a global
market.19
African nations are coming together to create strategies that would
redress these barriers. For example, NEPAD recognizes that the integration of Africa into emerging information societies is critical and views
Africas cultural diversity as a means of leveraging entrance.20 Furthermore, early evidence already demonstrates that Africans not only make
innovative use of new information and technology strategies but are
also effectively competing in the global market.21 In West Africa, a
womens fishing cooperative is using Web technology to compete in
world markets, and Namibian secondary school students, many of
whom had no previous computer experience, participated in an archive
project that preserved one of the largest insect collections in Africa.22
Thus, despite the many social and economic barriers facing African
people, these examples provide evidence that, given access and opportunity, Africa is able to take advantage of the ICT revolution.23
An early illustration of this transformative progression is demonstrated by the website Dakar Web. Facilitated by the Inter Society for
Electronic Art (ISEA), Dakar Web ran from 1 to 24 February 1999 in
Dakar, Senegal, as a series of workshops intended to provide African
artists drawn from various fields of visual arts, literature, and music,
with the opportunity to create Web fictions based on a collaborative
working process. Directed by Montreal artists Eva Quintas, Michel
Lefebvre, and Catherine McGovern,24 the workshops took place at
Metissacana, Senegals first cyber caf, and culminated in five Web fictions including Amika, Cauris, Lait Miraculeux, Petit Pagne, and Talibs.25
However, the fact that Dakar Web is a co-production between Senegal
and Canada raises issues of authorship and control. Co-productions
based on what have been described as alliances between North/South
partners can be potentially problematic given undeniable power differentials between so-called developed and underdeveloped nations. In
addition, creative control of the final product and conflicts between culturally different approaches to production can become issues of concern.26 Yet, such cooperation can also have positive benefits. For
100 Sheila Petty
example, Iba Ndiaye Diadji suggests that opportunities for networking

in Africa are constructive, given the potential for cultural exchanges.27
Certainly, Diadji views initiatives such as Dakar Web as an opportunity
for African artists to explore new aesthetic horizons and mutual enrichment between Western and African viewpoints by focusing on the
intersection between Western technology and African cultural traditions as narrative inspiration.28 Furthermore, narrative transformation
has been a commonplace process for, as Diadji argues, African artists
have used, as a point of departure, classical forms of expression, and
created links between them, or blended them in order to create something completely new.29 This demonstrates that Africans are extremely
adept at moulding so-called Western technology into a means of
expression specifically designed to suit African purposes and issues.
Ultimately, this reduces the influence of Western technology to a more
appropriate perspective in that technology becomes a tool of artistic
expression and not an end in itself. In other words, Western technology
in African hands becomes African technology.
Given this context, a question of standards arises: how should African Web narratives be analysed and within what specific parameters
should their efficacy be interrogated? Gabriel and Wagmister address
this issue by challenging the position that digital technologies and the
works that arise from them need not be solely delineated within the
paradigms of the industries and interests that produce and promote
them, thus arguing against the primacy of theories based on Eurocentric precepts.30 Instead, they foreground another way of framing the
digital imaginary by exposing the vital structural, aesthetic, and spiritual connections between older ways of weaving reality and newer
ways that tend to emphasize independence and innovation above all
else.31 Certainly, one of the clear outcomes of the Web fictions of Dakar
Web is the fact that African artists are frequently open to cross-disciplinary influences, creating aesthetic hybridity between visual arts, cinema, and literature: as Diadji observes, the links between various
forms of artistic expressions is an important characteristic of this artistic
Africanness.32 This is reflected in the dominant role played by orality
or oral tradition across artistic genres. Arising out of a post-Independence context in which African artists sought to redress Westocentric
misrepresentations and recoup cultures disparaged during colonization, oral tradition has played a major role in shaping the worldsense of
African identity in narrative forms ranging from literature to film to
television.33
Transformation of Web Narrative in Amika
101
As an early example of African digital narrative, Amika, along with the

other Web fictions of Dakar Web, extends oral narrative structure to new
media by continuing to contemporize these strategies. Most importantly, these works mark a transition in aesthetics in which African
sensibilities of time, space, and oral tradition are reconfigured for interactive spaces. As an explanatory tale charged with the task of exposing
a range of cultural ideas, Amika draws strongly on the metaphoric and
poetic structure of oral tales to create an immersive environment that
foregrounds Senegalese concepts of community and critique.34 On the
surface, the work has a deceptively simple design, pairing digital still
images of artworks with blocks of text that suggest a hypertext story.
However, as the narrative progresses and the spectator is actively drawn
into deciphering its meaning, Amika emerges as a complex Web fiction
driven by a rhetorical structure that relies on an African sense of time
and space in which absence becomes a means of engendering debate.
Time, as a cultural construct, has a profound role in defining many
different forms of African narrative structures. As Pamela Jennings
argues, written and oral cultures have created narrative structures
based upon seemingly opposing metaphors: the unidirectional line and
the iterative circle.35 As an example of the latter, African art forms
evoke a distinctive rhythm in which linearity in a tale or a brushstroke
in a painting, or form in sculpture are secondary to flashbacks and repetitions and stylized flourishes.36 This is evident in Amikas narrative
structure in which the interweaving of mythical forces and contemporary issues combine to play a major role in the dissemination of the Web
fiction. For example, the front page offers the user the choice of narrative branches in the form of three oval icons arranged in a triangle
against a grey, textured background. The icon at the top of the screen
features a sculptural image of Amika, a female figure created from
scrap metal and ragged cloth. To the left, against an ocean backdrop, is
the icon for the Lanternautes, fantastical figures comprised of lanterns
on legs, and to the right, the Witnesses icon reveals an abstract human
stick figure fashioned from thin metal bars and clad in African cloth.
The text on this page invites the user into the story by offering the following ambiguous fragments: Amika ... des lumires. Tel un phnix ...
Et les Tmoins passent/Amika ... of the lights. Like a phoenix ... and the
Witnesses go by. The ambiguity of these words is emphasized by the
repeated image of a question mark that runs vertically down the centre
of the screen, thus engaging the user immediately by encouraging her
or him to join in the process of assembling the narrative.
102 Sheila Petty
The text is interspersed around and between the images, creating a

series of shifting and interlocking blocks through the visual interplay
between text and image. The user must engage each element individually, a strategy that encourages a contemplative rhythm as the user
considers the ideological relationship between text and image. This
concept of space and time is similar to that employed in sub-Saharan
African cinema, in which the time the narrative subtends creates a
vision of the world registered in movement.37 Thus, the above example
demonstrates a slower, more deliberate unfolding narrative in which
emphasis is placed on taking time to appreciate the relationships
between image and word.
As a narrative, Amika could be likened to a piece of cloth in which the
three narrative strands, each with its own colour and form, are interwoven into a distinctly African pattern. The metaphor of weaving, as a
means of creating pedagogical links by which non-Western peoples
can integrate digital technologies into their own lives reflects an openended connection that gives primacy to a concept of social space and
community which Western notions of technology in their instrumentality and emphasis on the individual, tend to repudiate.38 The metaphor also de-emphasizes linear notions of history by raising the
possibility of three-dimensionality through texture, warp, and weft in
which unseen forces can have a visible effect on real-life events. Hence,
if weaving is a map of colour and form, then Amika is a spatial narrative
in which the journeys of the characters become a digital geography,
woven from ideology and linked together by narrative modalities of
passage.39
When the user clicks on the Amika icon on the front page, the narrative branches to a screen divided into two regions. The top half features
text on the left and a rectangular digital photograph on the right. The
digital image reveals Amika, a young woman who lives in a poor
squatters area amid garbage and other castoffs from a material society.
Placed against a real background of sandy earth and distant trees, the
figure of Amika foregrounds the fictional structure of the narrative
while connecting it to real places and time. The text that accompanies
this image describes Amika as awaking early and pondering the fleeting and treacherous morning light. It goes on to portray Amika as an
individual who has not, until this point, allowed things to weigh too
heavily on her mind. In the lower section of the screen is another image
of Amika, this time on the left and standing in the centre of railway
tracks that disappear in the distance behind her. The text opposite the
103
image emphasizes her infectious, happy smile, which some of the gentlemen of the Plateau take as flirtatious. These sections underscore
Amikas innocence by foreshadowing the unending poverty that will
later drive her to despair. Finally, the icons from the front page repeat in
the last section of the screen, allowing the user to move through the
three narrative threads in the order she or he chooses.
Ambiguity and metaphor are major contributors to the shape of the
narrative. As it branches out, the social environment through which
Amika navigates is implied by a description of three metaphorical
zones: the Plateau and its poverty-stricken inhabitants are caught
between the Mountain, where the wealthy live, and the Centre, where
the wealthy make their money. The extent of Amikas exclusion from
privilege is implied by the revelation that people of her status are only
allowed to travel to the Mountain in order to sell the flowers that grow
on the garbage heaps in the Plateau. The economic divide is heightened
by a depiction of the Mountain people as scarabs who descend to the
Centre to roll up large balls of money that they then stockpile on the
Mountain. Yet another indication of marginalization occurs in an incident where Amika, in a desire to fit in with the fashionable young
women of the Centre who wear short skirts, rips her own to just above
the knee. There is no direct statement that Amika fails to achieve the
desired acceptance: rather, this is indirectly alluded to by the fact that
her exposed knees reveal that she does not have the opportunity to
wash often, indicating a lack of access to water and hence underscoring
her poverty. In each of these cases, the text offers no explicit judgment
on whether or not the economic gap between Africans is just: it merely
describes the situation, leaving the user to choose her or his own perspective regarding the significance of Amikas living conditions. This
strategy evidences distinct pedagogical goals as the discursive space
that arises from the narrative encourages the user to debate ethical
quandaries raised by a community divided into haves and have-nots.
The influence of oral tradition on African narrative structures creates
a profoundly unique worldsense based on ontologies in which the
world consists of interacting forces of cosmological scale and significance rather than of discrete secularised concrete objects.40 This is evident in the narrative structure of Amika as supernatural forces play a
major role in the development of the action. For example, despite their
human-like figures, the Witnesses are not clearly human, nor are they
purely mystical; rather, they occupy an interesting middle ground
between the two. Dedicated to gossip and their own amusement, the
104 Sheila Petty
Witnesses take joy in observing other peoples pleasure or pain without

intervening, thus making them a metaphorical representation of an
uncaring society. In addition, the Witnesses conduct their activities
within the frame of a journey that parallels and eventually crosses that
of Amikas, although in this case it takes the form of a restless passage
through the Centre as they seek out the next victim to satisfy their voyeuristic needs.
Clicking on the Witnesses icon on Amikas front page leads the user
to a screen that features a still image of a group of Witnesses lined up
against a wall. The text, arranged above and below the image in the
centre of the screen, suggests that the Witnesses symbolize a timeless
force, alluding to their supernatural qualities. It is significant that they
are always portrayed in a group, unlike Amika, who is often depicted
alone in the frame. This emphasizes their role as a societal force in contrast to Amikas role as an individual, thus according them a position of
power while reinforcing Amikas vulnerability. Another difference
between the two is evident in a later branch that describes the daily
activities of the Witnesses. The page is dominated by two still images:
the first is located on the top left of the screen and is a medium long
shot of the Witnesses and the second is a long shot located at the centre
left. Both depict the Witnesses gathered in groups beneath a tree and
are accompanied by text that reveals how they while away the daylight
hours by exchanging witty remarks disparaging the last spectacle they
observed. Taken together, the images and the text accentuate the nonproductive leisure of the Witnesses existence, foregrounding the dissimilarity between their state and that of Amika, who must work for
her meagre living. Hence, the association of the Witnesses with the
urban space of the Centre provides the user with an additional level of
discourse in which the Witnesses predation on weaker members of
society signals a breakdown of community values in the metropolis.
However, once again, there is no specific condemnation of the values
held by the Witnesses; nor is there an openly negative portrayal of their
actions. Rather, the narrative posits the failure of the Witnesses to intervene as a story strand that is then to be placed into context by the user
with all the other strands offered by the narrative. This process encourages the user to participate in meaning-making by creating their own
ideological map of the Web fiction.
In contrast to the ambiguous nature of the Witnesses, the Lanternautes are portrayed clearly as supernatural forces. This is indicated in
the first segment of their narrative thread that is divided into three sec-
105
tions and demarked by text and digital photographs. The text at the top
of the screen identifies the Lanternautes as the children of Ymanja,
goddess of the sea. As bearers of light, the Lanternautes illuminate the
depths of the ocean but leave their marine world for land if they hear a
genuine distress call. The digital photographs of the Lanternautes
emphasize a particular relationship with Ymanja. Portrayed in long
shot, they are depicted in the foreground on a sandy beach with blue
water in the middle ground and luminous sky in the background. The
metaphorical presence of the goddess, indicated by the water and brilliant sky, grounds the Lanternautes in nature, giving them an ethereal,
otherworldly visual force. The story space of the Lanternautes, strongly
linked to nature imagery, evokes a sense of spirituality that is absent
from the urban space of the Witnesses. Viewed in this light, the Lanternautes appear associated with the mystical force of African tradition as
a means of healing urban alienation. This is underscored in a later
branch revealing that the Lanternautes only leave the sea when they are
responding to the distress of individuals who have lost the light in their
lives. Their drive to intercede on behalf of these individuals and rekindle their light makes a powerful contrast with the Witnesses, who not
only refuse to intervene but subject the individual to ridicule. The difference in their status as narrative agents is further demonstrated by
the respect they command: for example, when their journey through
the city takes them across busy roads, truck drivers yield to them in deference. Thus, the Lanternautes represent an affirmative connection to
the rhizome of African identity and are symbolic of positive community values worth reverence.
The above descriptions of the three narrative patterns that comprise
Amika may appear to reflect a linear arrangement of story elements.
However, as Gabriel and Wagmister argue, digital weaving involves
interlacing lines that are connected on an aesthetic and conceptual level
by the cross threads of interactivity.41 In other words, what has been
described above in a linear fashion for the sake of clarity is experienced
by the user as a series of fragments assembled through choice. Thus, the
user is at the loom, drawing threads through at will by clicking on the
icons at the bottom of each page and creating a narrative pattern and
meaning that is unique to her or his experience. In this sense, Amika
unfolds like a mystery, as the user must delve into the relationship
between narrative fragments, just as she or he must determine the ideological relevance of each page. Furthermore, the structure of the narrative threads ensures that the user must explore them all in order to
106 Sheila Petty
arrive at a full understanding of Amikas experiences. For example,

should a user decide to click solely on the Lanternaute icons, she or he
will be unable to follow the narrative thread to its conclusion: the final
icon will lead back to the front page, encouraging the user to explore
the other narrative threads in order to place the story in its proper context in terms of the whole. The effect of this strategy is to reinforce an
African sense of time and space as the narrative requires persistence
and reflection on the part of the user in order to derive its full meaning.
The process of non-linear assemblage undertaken by the user underscores the importance of narrative ambiguity in Amika. The role of metaphor, allusion, and absence in the Web fiction results in a certain
obscurity in events and character motivation that demands interpretation by the user. The use of obscurity and ambiguity is a narrative hallmark in many sub-Saharan oral genres and is intended to engage
composers and listeners in a game of signification, in which meanings
are generated, secreted, and withheld or retrieved according to definite
and specialized conventions, and where access to these meanings may
be highly restricted, filtered or layered.42 Thus, the presence of ambiguity in Amika reflects a narrative strategy specifically targeted to
enhancing the users role in creating meaning. The character of Amika
exemplifies this process as key questions of motive are left unresolved
in the story. For instance, the reason for Amikas journey to the city is
never explained, leaving it open to wide speculation. Furthermore, as
Amika approaches the city, she becomes overwhelmed by a sense of
spiritual malaise, the source of which remains a mystery. From the
point of view of the user, a variety of interpretations are possible: it
could be grounded in her poverty, or in a growing realization that she is
marginalized in her society, or in a growing desperation that she will
never escape the interminable road that connects the Plateau with the
Centre. Therefore, the ambiguity of her psychological distress emphasizes the recombinant possibilities of the storys competing ideological
thrusts.
At the height of her anguish, Amika encounters the Witnesses. Here,
the screen is divided into three sections at staggered intervals down the
page. The Witnesses appear at the top of the screen in a digital image on
the left and are accompanied by text in orange on the right, indicating
that they are searching for a spectacle to enjoy. Amika is depicted on
screen right in a digital image in which she is isolated in darkness. The
text, now in red, describes her as she collapses to her knees, violently
wracked with sobs. The final image on the screen reveals her prostrate
107
body on the ground, as the text describes her screaming, hurling body
as a sight no one pays attention to. Although there is no direct reference
to the Witnesses encountering Amika and participating in her humiliation as onlookers, the proximity of their image to those illustrating her
distress implies that this is the case. The fact that Amika does not
acknowledge their presence heightens the sense of voyeurism by leaving it open to interrogation. Thus, the absence of an explicit statement
of relationship between the sections compels the user to forge the interconnections her/himself.
Although the effect is somewhat delimited by the users non-linear
assemblage of the narrative, it is worthwhile noting that Amika possesses narrative resolution in which the intervention of the Lanternautes is key to restoring positive African social values. In the final
branch of the narrative, screen space is broken into three sections. In the
top third, a digital photograph on the right depicts the Lanternautes
gathering around Amikas prostrate form. The text, located left of the
image, indicates that they have heard Amikas piteous cries and have
come with the light she needs. Below the text is another photograph,
this time of a single Lanternaute striding across the rocky ground. To
the right, the text states they will build a bonfire if they find the person
they are searching for, as a means of restoring happiness to their lives.
The last section is dominated by two phrases. The first asserts that the
Lanternautes return Amikas smile and the last, cast in a larger font,
declares that it is a genuine smile, indicating that Amika has been spiritually restored. It is significant that the narrative climaxes ambiguously in the text. This achieves two goals: first, the strategy foregrounds
the word as the most important aesthetic in the work, connecting the
Web fiction to the continuing evolution of African oral history. Second,
it serves to give primacy to the supernatural forces that rescue Amika,
therefore creating an open ending as the light given her has many
possible explanations. For example, it could indicate an affirmation of
African spirituality as a reservoir of strength or represent the selfknowledge attained through a difficult journey. Hence, the absence of a
definitive resolution creates a kind of narrative persistence that fosters
discussion beyond the conclusion of the story as the user seeks to interpret the true meaning of the ending. Ultimately, by engaging the users
imagination, Amika generates both debate and interactivity.
Although the question of access to technology remains contentious in
Africa, the success of Amika as an early African Web narrative lies in its
ability to recast existing African narrative and aesthetic strategies to
108 Sheila Petty
bring African imperatives to a global platform. As Ousmane Sembne

remarks, Whatever its form, subject or content, artistic expression
stems from a lived and shared social reality ... If you know how to see,
you can easily locate those African signs and symbols where the ethnic
roots offer as much to the continent as to the outside world.43 This new
technology complements existing means of artistic expression for, as
artist Moussa Tine observes, we will never abandon our paintbrushes
because they are irreplaceable: however, they allow us to push the limits of chromatic research.44 Thus, by leveraging digital technology and
adapting it to African aims through an African approach, it is evident
that the intersection of African oral and artistic traditions with outside
influences is leading to the development of a unique African newmedia aesthetic as a continuation of long-standing artistic traditions.
NOTES
A version of this chapter was originally presented at the Media in Transition 2
Conference at MIT, 1012 May 2002. I am indebted to Michel Lefebvre for providing access to the Dakar Web projects. My thanks also go to Santichart
Kusakulsomsak and D.L. McGregor.
1 I borrow the phrase iterative circle in my title from Pamela Jennings. See
her Narrative Structures for New Media: Towards a New Definition,
Leonardo 29, no. 5 (1996): 34550.
2 Steven Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We
Create and Communicate (New York: Harper Collins, 1997), 229.
3 Pierre Lvy, Becoming Virtual Reality in the Digital Age, trans. Robert
Bononno (New York: Plenum Trade, 1998), 126.
4 Ibid., 140.
5 Eric J. Cassidy, Preface: Virtual Futures, in Virtual Futures: Cyberotics, Technology, and Post-Human Pragmatism, ed. Joan Broadhurst Dixon and Eric J.
Cassidy (London: Routledge, 1998), ix.
6 Michael Heim, The Cyberspace Dialectic, in The Digital Dialectic: New
Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1999), 44.
7 Teshome H. Gabriel and Fabian Wagmister, Notes on Weavin Digital:
T(h)inkers at the Loom, Suitcase: A Journal of Transcultural Traffic 2, no. 12
(1997): 105.
8 Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1998), 147.
109
9 Ibid.
10 Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1994), 2.
11 Yaya Karim Drabo, Le Paradoxe Africain de la Tlvision: lAlternative par
la Contrainte, in Petits Ecrans et Dmocratie: Vido Lgre et Tlvision Alternative au Service du Dveloppement, ed. Nancy Thde and Alain Ambrosi (Paris:
Syros-Alternatives, Vido Tiers Monde and Vidazimut, 1992), 108.
12 See http://www.isea.qc.ca/africa/dakar/index.html.
13 NEPAD (New Partnership for Africas Development), http://www.
africanrecovery.org/Documents/AA0010101.pdf (October 2001), 23.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 UNESCO, Information and Communication Technology Policies and Strategies, http://www.uneca.org/codi/docs/doc22EN.pdf (7 August 2001),
11.
17 Ibid., 14.
18 UNESCO, A Strategy to Accelerate African Development through the
Increased Use of Information and Communication Technologies, http://
www.uneca.org/codi/docs/doc25EN.pdf (7 August 2001), 3.
19 Moudjibath Daouda, Les Enjeux dInternet en Afrique, Africultures,
December 1999, 6.
20 NEPAD, 23.
21 UNESCO, A Strategy, 2.
22 Ibid.
23 Ibid.
24 Eva Quintas is a photographer and initiated the workshops for ISEA.
Michel Lefebvre is a writer and multimedia producer. Catherine McGovern
is a Web art producer.
25 Workshop participants: Amika (Ndary L, Massamba Mbaye, Moussa Tine,
Madick Seck); Cauris (Serigne Mbaye Camara, Viye Diba, Frres Guiss);
Lait Miraculeux (Mamadou Fall Dabo, Sa Diallo, Alpha Sow); Petit Pagne
(Rackie Diankha, Pape Teigne Diouf, Assane Gning, Vieux Mac Faye); Talibs (Anta Germaine Gaye, Fatou Sow Ndiaye, Djibril Sy).
26 The question of authentic African authorship in European/African co-productions is the subject of much debate in African indigenous media production. For further discussion see Clment Tapsoba, The Influence of Aid on
the Creativeness of Filmmakers, Ecrans dAfrique 1314 (3rd4th quarter
1995): 8693, and Teresa Hoefert de Turegano, FESPACO 1999: The Cultural
Politics of Production and Francophone West African Cinema, Black
Renaissance / Renaissance noire 3 (fall 2000): 14567.
110 Sheila Petty

27 Iba Ndiaye Diadji, LAfricanit Artistique Face aux Dfis des Nouvelles
Technologies, Colloque: Art Africain et Nouvelles Technologies (23 April 1999,
Montreal), Vues dAfrique: 11, http://www.isea.qc.ca/africa/colloque/
bio_fr/iba_conf.html (site now discontinued).
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., 5: Cest comme si, tout en partant des formes dexpression classiques,
les artistes africains taient en train de sceller des mariages entres elles, pour
que demain naissent peut-tre dautres formes jusque l inconnues.
30 Gabriel and Wagmister, Notes on Weavin Digital, 105.
31 Ibid.
32 Diadji, LAfricanit Artistique, 5: La parent entre les diffrentes formes
dexpression artistique est retenir aussi comme une des caractristiques de
cette africanit artistique.
33 Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Culture, and Continuity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 293.
34 Ibid., 203.
35 Jennings, Narrative Structures for New Media, 346.
36 Diadji, LAfricanit Artistique, 4: Ici la linarit dans le rcit ou le trait en
peinture ou la forme en sculpture laissent leurs places des retours en
arrire, des rptitions et des courbes fortement stylises.
37 Olivier Barlet, African Cinemas: Decolonizing the Gaze, trans. Chris Turner
(London: Zed Books, 2000), 173.
39 Carol Muller, Chakide The Teller of Secrets: Space, Song, and Story in Zulu
Maskanda Performance, in Oral Literature and Performance in Southern Africa,
ed. Duncan Brown (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), 230.
40 Keyan Tomaselli, Arnold Shepperson, and Maureen Eke, Towards a Theory
of Orality in African Cinema, in African Cinema: Post-Colonial and Feminist
Readings, ed. Kenneth W. Harrow (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1999),
45.
42 Karin Barber, Obscurity and Exegesis in African Oral Praise Poetry, in Oral
Literature and Performance, ed. Brown, 30.
43 Ousmane Sembne, Information Technology, Power, Cinema, and Television in Africa, in Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema: Audiences, Theory, and
the Moving Image, ed. June Givanni (London: British Film Institute, 2000),
185.
44 Moussa Tine, Dakarweb, Africultures, December 1999, 47: On abandonnera jamais nos pinceaux car ils demeurent irremplaables, mais elles permettent de pousser encore plus loin la recherche chromatique.
5 Handcrank That Globalism: A Digi-Dialogue

a b i g a i l c hi l d
8-14 In rural Vermont, boundary rocks are hidden in the forest, are everywhere, no place remains unknown, untouched, no matter how distant.
I receive my first e-mail from Africa.
The materiality of the image means very little on digital. You are viewing a recomposed material. You are working against density. Content
becomes king, externalized, broad lines of action thats all you can
see. Different areas of interest come into play including accessibility,
large swaths of data, an array of possible structures, repetition, and
reproduction.
8-15 Perhaps in digital, its not what you see so much as how its permutated? how its reconstituted? A friend argues digital is more material,
since you can potentially address every pixel individually. Thus structure, not content, becomes critical: how the data is accessed is the determining feature. In this way, Digital = a conceptual device, a recontextualization through variable indexing, a mapping to create meaning, space named in order to reconstitute time.
In video and digital projection, admittedly, subtlety is lost; blacks are
Regular Type = Comparisons between digi, analogue, film: the backstory (from entries
in fall 2000).
Bold = Playlist project meeting notes (from entries in spring 2003).
Italic = Inner thoughts, responses, questions, unspoken (from entries in summer 2003).
112 Abigail Child
hard to judge, theres slippage. Your eye grows accustomed to the deteriorated quality of the image it adjusts and with it a whole set of values shadows, colour, detail are undermined. The aesthetics and
social implications of Robert Venturis theories of a mobile spectatorship for architecture are instructive here: for the Baseball Hall of Fame
he designs a billboard building wherein stats from baseball history
are manipulated onto a giant billboard as seen from the highway,
behind which a one-storey, temporary-looking structure houses the
museum that is, we live in a world of frontage, illusion, mobility, and
surface.1
8-18 But, argues a friend, you need to consider that as processing speeds
increase and storage gets ever smaller and cheaper, there is no reason that
home video couldnt have, say, 100 times more pixels than 70 mm has
grains, and thus would eventually have far greater resolution than film.
And surely some future liquid crystal display (or whatever) could produce black-black blacks. So the promise of superseding film is still on the
table, though a part of me says this has been on the table for fifteen years.
Its not there yet.
Today, cosmologists are saying that Surface is the limit of knowledge.
With depth gone, the philosophical basis is changed. Duration becomes
less important than contact.
History: In 1970, I edit my first film on an upright moviola with a
postcard-size screen. The machine resembles an old sewing machine
turned upside down, a bug on its back with its legs flailing, many
wheels, and a foot pedal. You turned it on and it would spin in a furor
and split your film lengthwise down the middle (as likely as not). The
flatbeds, their reels lying flat on the machine, were a more stable
option, particularly the German-made Steenbeck developed during the
war. By the 1970s, they were common in the States, with a nifty switching system where the gears and sprockets could be changed between 16
and 35 mm. The United States turned out its own editing table, the
Moviola, but it was never as reliable as the more sturdy and mechanically designed Steenbeck, which, like Kleenex, was a brand name that
became the name for the thing.
113
Topology
Intellectual property
In kind
How to keep it tidy
Three kinds of new media:

algorithmic, autonomous, and interactive
Forms view Search thread Generic raw clips Operation plug-ins

How to make the interaction more than just choosing between
limited givens?
Film looks the best at this point in time, is the most material in an era
that grows steadily more virtual. Editing in film might be cheaper than
video if you take into account buying all the digi equipment. Yet, once
you have the equipment, digital is mighty fun and convenient a kind
of optical printer or copying machine, plus recording instrument, plus
titling production all-in-one. Its cheaper and quicker than film for
shooting, and more accessible. With digital editing, this doubling of the
editing tool as printer and composer means repetition is a governing
principle, becomes a structural trope in much video art. If you choose
an in and out point to make a loop, you can play it immediately. This
laser-like slip to the beginning the cyclical repetition satisfies some
primeval loop-need in us all. Whether early Dara Birnbaum cut-ups of
TV shows (analog) or contemporary performance constructions of the
collaborative Ng, repetition is an elemental aspect.2
Media artists create an interface that permits a dialogue so the
public can access several views through multiple filters to create
unique paths through the material.
8-20 Sometimes for me all the processing reads as meaningless abstraction. How to make processing meaningful? How to avoid sameness? Or
perhaps what Im asking is what is the meaning of abstraction? When
114 Abigail Child
does abstraction, which applies as well to tech talk, to language itself, to

the language of power especially, to a rhetoric of specialties, to distance as
a way to connect, become a cover or excuse or lack of courage to investigate the real? Or/and is there any real to begin with? Is this question
moot? In light of the present?
Another friend underlines that the same gesture means something different in different contexts, different eras. So that, for instance, the sound
and art of the early 70s, which are often echoed in minimalist works of
today, stem from different aims: in the 70s the quest was epistemological,
whereas now it has more to do with contemporary life space, post disco,
post airport music.
In any case, is our flesh a kind of limit? Can I void these questions? They
keep bobbing through the weave of this article limits, flesh, contact,
body, surface, depth, meaning, abstraction, political manipulation, economic manipulation. Am I being nostalgic for the material body? Can I
say nothings gained aesthetically through digi except speed? Does it matter if an aesthetic response is diminished in a medium if this is the contemporary state? The quality of the sacred has declined in Western culture.
Have other aspects offset this loss? What are they?
Whenever we talk about pathways on this project, I think of
Piagets structures of cognition and his essay on structuralism,
where he speaks of wholeness as a defining mark of structures
with its high hopes for organizing systems or information: our
trees of video involving many branches, in connecting and
indexical structures.3 Piaget points to Godels discovery that the
formalist program cannot be executed. In the first place, he
showed that no consistent formal system sufficiently rich to
contain elementary arithmetic can demonstrate its own
consistency. Piaget concludes:
... rather than envisaging human knowledge as a pyramid or
building of some sort, we should think of it as a spiral the
radium of whose turns increases as the spiral rises. This means,
in effect, that the idea of structure as a system of
transformations becomes continuous with that of construction
as continual formation.4
115
8-21 As an artist involved in making, this seems irresistible.

Structural, too, is the live feed component of simultaneous broadcast,
whether that be coverage of war or a trip to the moon. Still other structures of video/digital are transmission problems that haunt the reporter
appearing on your television screen, reminding you of the frame of the
presentation, of the fragility of life on tape, elements peeling off, or
interfered with in air, intercepted, at war. We witness through degradation the short life span of various media modes, all with a shorter life
span than classical art forms, such as the book, painting, drawing now
CDs you make yourself have a two-year life, VHS ten years, digital
twenty years, on the outside.5
8-22 He describes himself as on the outside looking out.
8-23 Has the human achievement been to constantly overcome the limits
of the body, in order to last? Has art practice focused on the making body,
the groundedness of body, the handmade or the translation of the energies
of the body, the paradoxes of the body in vital contrast to the objects that
survive? Has not reproduction long worn away the grain of the sacred?
Benjamins aura left dangling in ether?
Sacred becomes cartoon power as transmitted into digi-cyber culture:
machines attached to body, in sexual-social fantasy, as populist intervention. How can we resist the fetishistic speed, convenience, and
omnipresence of digi/video? Its cheap (at least to shoot), its bubbly
(all those plastic colours), its everywhere, potential live feed. Chicago
68, Tiananmen Square 91, Seattle 99, New York 9/11. Digital utopianism confronts crass commodity/distribution, not as an inversion but
as opposite sides of the same sphere, co-existing in contradiction.
Music decides the path.
8-31 The miniaturization of information in digital allows for omnivorous
inclusion; the 01s code files, rsums, music, stills, moving images, books.
The laptop becomes a library in a box, an encyclopedia at hand, word processing a kind of printing similar to letterpress (surprisingly) in the
sense that there are a set of parts to be combined, printed/saved, and then
recombined for the next page. This sense of structural elements that can
116 Abigail Child
recombine; this sense of time to research or time to compose, then print

forever (lightly), and bring back to zero. A powerful sense of invention,
combination, and multitudes is indicated. Regarding the fetish aspect of
miniaturization, we think of Star Trek and the characters inevitable diagnostic palm computer/transporter. More on Earth: at the Langlois Foundation building in Montreal, a black one-inch round metal piece is the key
that magically opens doors when you hold out your hand. More remotes.
More locked remotes.
Reminding me of the way New York is often behind technologies of Europe
and Canada; its actually comfortably old-fashioned if foolishly parochial.
People move to cities to be bodied together. A concentration of flesh in
which technology is not deployed as contact so much as consultation.
There will be nothing random in the branches of images we
produce. Rather the public will perform a metadata search among
authored clips, using language to activate the parts of the weave to
create an architecture or new patterning through the system.
9-3 The only site on the Web I know that exists without text, without language, is Matt Mullicans http://www.centreimage.ch/mullican/WorldFramed.html. It shocks because it has no information. An ideal of
distribution without purpose.
On another hand, the Internet O Internet provides a forum for politics. The
march in New York City in 2003 is testament to Web organizing and to
Howard Deans banished presidential campaign. The ability to pinpoint interests makes the Web an intrusive commodity machine but also a profound tool for getting you out on the streets, voting, spreading information.
Degradation as Genre. Analog video editing is linear, which means it
does not open when you insert a shot, as does digi and film long
before. One could argue digi was developed to solve the non-linearity
issues of analog video. In analog editing, when you wish to insert a
shot, you need to copy the sequence that follows, to make the insert and
re-edit the previously cut piece back in. Eventually, the image quality
degrades. It is a copy of a copy, a generation or more down, and before
digital, that means the colours degrade, the edges of objects bleed until
eventually the video image is five or six generations down, utterly frus-
117
trated, the image melted, pixels leached, pouring off the surface, its
reds and greens sliding like a high-contrast duplicated film print at old
drive-in movies where the pizza ads look bloody and hysterical. I
always liked that look myself, but it is fabulously unstable an artifact
as out of date and appealing as drive-ins themselves.
9-5 Why is everything processed? Why wish it werent?
Film is the digi model clearly: ideas of bins, cuts, dissolves, frames,
non-linear timelines all reference mainstream cinema practice while
these, plus ideas of discontinuity, gaps, jump-cuts, systems, interruptions, weave, and repetition explicitly reference experimental film
practice.6
9-6 Why do multi-screens seem so palpable, so delicious, right now? They
jump the film model entirely there is no uni-focus and more clearly multiple screens recreate the way information comes in at us, impossible to
take in at one time.
We come up with
Corn syrup
Saccharine
Zylotol
Aspartame
Glucose
Sucrose
Honey
Let me finish my recap.

You could make tweaks.
You could edit the numbers.
We represent precedence (hierarchy).
Who is that we?
118 Abigail Child
We represent volume.
We represent breakpoint.
Haunted by thoughts of degradation when we read that the cloned
sheep Dolly is/was aging more rapidly, we realize digi life may have a
short future as well. What we thought were exact reproductions, material copies imagined out of factory models, permanent dupes, are nothing so much as Xeroxes: fading copies. Time, or is it space, demands
unique particularities, however transitory. Its a different kind of time
certainly, more spontaneous, more exploratory (potentially): all these
versions available and re-available, redo and looping functions, immediate feedback, ability to insert words and phrases, dates and intertitles
at the moment of ideation. A very immediate performative time at the
edit bench. Waiting to render.
9-10 I buy hand weights to have beside my editing table to work out my
upper body while Im waiting for rendering or the machine to come on.
THE MACHINES ARE TRAINING THE BODY.
Go around non-stop
Change to plastic money
Jacket and sneakers mark globalism
Creating a universal system of clips with directory and database of
views
We get stuck with engineering
A scatter bulletin view
9-12 Am I wedded to depth?
How a timeline keeps going?
Handcrank that globalism.
Early on in the editing of 16 mm, Ill go through all my material a second time and more for selects. Ive often thought the best shots show up
now not the obvious good take, but the strange, witty, oddball material. When the piece is close to being done, I am usually looking for
some remembered shot or seeking some bridge and might go through
119
all my material again. Ive adapted this process to digi. It works best
when you digitize every shot of your original; otherwise, the later process is complicated by the need to digitize all parts you missed. Either
way, its a time-consuming process. Some makers have their digi masters transferred to VHS to protect the fragile original while they log and
familiarize themselves with the material. This is a reconstructed workprint model, underscoring the idea of original and copy, alien to the
concept of digital, yes, but a practice that acknowledges digi-tapes
real-life fragility.
9-13 Drop outs
Crackling
Rumble
Flipping
Sounds like turning motors
Ripple delete
Cocks and guns
In the can
The other screen has genitals
Set it
Forget
Our Method of investigation involves a deliberate poetics.
We aim to create an interface.
9-14 How many paragraphs could be written on that word interface? The
language of the new technology is suggestive of and strangely references
analogue processes and meta-definitions this insistent reference to the
arguably outdated body.
Connect any cold to hot lead
Wrap what happens at edge to go further
Dont do anything until we harness the cold lead
Reds are potentials
From 1973 to1975, WNBC editors are still working with hand-cranked
rewinds and a jerrybuilt system that rigged the sound rolls under the
viewer, to be read off a magnetic head on the synchronizer. With these
120 Abigail Child
improvised and funky mechanics, these news editors could cut synchronous pictures amazingly fast. And they were using a technology already
fifty years old [rumour has it that at CNN, editors are working analog since
they havent retooled!]. On a motorized editing table, invented in the
1950s, you feel physically exhausted after a solid eight- to twelve-hour
day. Usually its been a dance of getting up to the bin, reaching over,
searching or picking out shots, stopping and returning the film to fast
rewind and relooking. [Does this sound nostalgic at this point in time?] As
far as getting a notebook or a cup of coffee, these activities recur in the
eight- to twelve-hour day on the Avid/FCP, but the muscle/bone dance
has been in a smaller circle the bin is a click away, after all making
decisions faster, less bodily structured. And its much harder on your
eyes. In 1989, I edit 3/4 analog video and have a different kind of headache that night than I had ever had before. My body aches. My brain circuits do adjust. I dont have headaches every time I edit now, but I do feel
a video effect on the brain and eyes, under the gaze of the computer.
That was nothing.
Unlike other views, geometry counts.
We have Scatter view, Space view, and Time view.
Data index is Bin view.
We are going to have chains of processing channels composing
ladders of operations across everything.
This is spatial?
Ive only just invented this and we may not make it.
A chain of vast plug-ins
9-16 Were making Vertovs dream plebian
All access depends on how we navigate, i.e., how we name history.
Plant sign posts
Reuse a phrase
Trans-global ELITE
Neo PETS
Hacker conventions and a doc plot Letters talking across borders
Time and money
BETAVILLE the
Premise: imagining technology more accurate than human sight
121
9-17 But isnt that replaying Dziga Vertovs outdated optimism? His
1928 formalist film masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera combines
humane city symphony with exhilarating referential film form. By the
1930s this energy is not so much exhausted as controlled, stymied by Stalin. You see the beginnings of this decline in Vertovs sound film Enthusiasm (1931) with its billowing factory smoke and darkening drums. Today
we exist in a more pessimistic, slicker state. We experience the corporate
machine as surveillance of the local. A reversal of the pyramid of power
and information is what is needed, but will we be able to sludge through
it? How to negotiate the fear of the human body disappearing into the
Net? We have incorporated taken into the body, into our day the
ephemeral, distance, pause button and absence. We use it to get closer.
Perhaps Peter Kubelkas Pause (1976) marks a significant moment. This
16 mm film by the great Austrian film experimentalist is a monument to
the inability to speak face to face. Emotion refigured in non-language.
Duration filled with expressive body movements suggestive of intent but
unreadable. Kubelka has before and after Pause been involved in an ongoing unfinished film project: Monument for the Old World (Denkmal fur
die alte Welt). It is tempting to think of Pause in relation to Beckett, tape
overwhelming Kubelkas avowed classicism.
Then comes the question of ownership?
We discuss Leningrad vs. Legend examining different
ways to collaborate.
Man. I was blown away. It was a girl doing electronics.
Some things never change.
Maybe we should begin each statement with Bastard.
How to move into another environment?
A file handler can solve these problems?
In a real-world scenario rounding them up.
Theres a latency issue here.
A head room issue.
Containers are where the mutability occurs.
122 Abigail Child
Error as Genre: The mistakes one makes on the flatbed with celluloid
in hand are different from those encountered on a computer. Cutting
film directed me to these structural errors and fortuitous possibilities
grabbing the tail [end] of a shot when one wants the head [start],
seeing the upside result. My film DARK DARK (2001) is constructed
around just such ideas, described as a montage of footage from four
pre-existing films, composed and ordered by what seems an incredibly
complex design. Narrative chronologies are alternately straight or
inverted, within each of which the individual shots proceed alternately
forward or in reverse the film simultaneously goes backwards forwards and forwards backwards. The result is experienced as multiple
waves of counter-intuitive time that collide with each other like ripples
in a bathtub. The disorientation of duration is complicated by the films
physical disorientation: its frequently rotated about the horizontal or
vertical axes.7 The point that this is a kind of mistake you wont
encounter on digital. Though you can reconstruct them. In the digi
realm, there are other errors: for example, on the time line, things get
moved, covering up one track or another, creating rhythms and unexpected counterpoint. In this case, the image is printing over material, a
process that is intrinsic to analogue video as well, but not to film editing. There are also artifacts, fallacies of cloning and looking for a source
that mistakenly lies under same names. Labels become essential in digital even as an indexing error can cause fruitful digressions.
We already have a ton of names.
Implicitly created directories as opposed to explicit and
unconsciously created directories
All the past available all the time
That would be a key word thing.
Searches are alive
You want a dead search? Why?
9-18 Using physics, the hard-drive spins
A set of instructions for my notes
Many alphabets for instructions
Many letters for action
Shift drag backwards.
I want to upset the file holders
123
What about the unadvanced?

Weve finished the recap
Im serious, I dont want to go there.
Its in my dossier.
The process is a conversation
There will be nomenclature
Wiki it out.
9-19 O wick wick wacky.
The future is behind us.
Protocol of long distance collaboration:
off the hook, out of control, the phone is ringing.
Rapid fire Thumbnails
Bites Points Modifications
Edit the view mode
Property can change
Meta-data you cant
Change newer than one hour will be red
Hybridity lives! Colleagues shoot a feature in half-inch because they
like that slippery look, edit on digital and transfer back to film for projection. Students shoot off the screen and combine that with digital and
process through Premiere, happy with their dub. It seems film will
struggle on until Hollywood decides to shift to hi-resolution DV, and
then therell be more years of activity among persistent artists celebrating the fragility and light-projected hallucinations of film and mixed
mediums. By then there will be mini hi-def DV, cheap(er) and sophisticated systems with user-friendly interface and add-ons. There will be
wall TV, multiple-screen movies, and mini single-channels everywhere,
as are now on Viennese subways and in New York cabs. Fulfilling Venturis prophecy of the mobile spectator by mobilizing the billboard as
well. There is no escape from the barrage of commodity ads, inducements, and time entrapments. As what we describe as memory grows
cheaper, the ambivalent Luddite in us all wonders how and if our real
memories are being diluted, sabotaged by stereotypical sentimentali-
124 Abigail Child
ties, exhausted by no off time for creative meditation, by distance as

relation, multiplied into ether, random, convinced, unconvinced.
Speed is a censor
Naming gives the action
Speed is a SENSOR
Reversing input
Flip is a form
Connecting by clicking and dragging name to key words
Generates Flag morph to Flower to Pirate Picaresque
One-eyed Cyclops to war victim Texts
or rants that horrify
Make interventions be the image

9-21 We double star that line **
9-22 One of the first applications (of interactive television) will obviously be pay-per-view movies. So reads the latest bulk mailing I receive
from a nationally based cable company. The cynicism and opportunism of
commodity capital is obvious. Rather, we are seeking to make interaction
more than a choice among limited givens.
When the cell is saturated it is simply sub-divided.
Function follows tool, migrates
immigrates, emigrates, and, finally, assimilates.
Digital is a drift from the body whatever its connections to film editing.
It changes the type of edit, it refines the edit from the butt cut of celluloid, it destroys the pretty picture and the detail of the long shot. It combines and recombines, it layers and it reproduces. Its radiant room
energies and physicality in-the-making are different. So, a web of anecdote and transitory experience, waiting for new conditions.
9-25 A disposable technology. Your speed reinvents and recombines. Artificial and fictive: a kind of crumbly, non-lasting mock-heroic, nifty historical device. My mobile went out to hear. Your SPEECH which is the physical
125
manifestation of b r e a k u p. Mars shadow ate up the lander. There

were no signals coming back.
NOTES
With thanks to Playlist originators Willie La Maitre and Eric Rosenzveig, as
well as Henry Hills and Melissa Ragona, all of whom read and advised. Any
remaining errors are mine.
1 Robert Venturi, Museum of Modern Art Papers on Architecture (New York:
MOMA, 1968).
2 Dara Birnbaum, architect-turned-videomaker, whose early works from 1979,
Wonder Woman and Kojak/Wang, used looping and interruption from contemporary TV shows and advertisements to humorously investigate and critique
mainstream gender stereotypes.
3 Jean Piaget, Structuralism, trans. and ed. Chaninah Maschler (New York:
Harper Colophon, 1970).
4 Ibid., 34.
5 The information about the life of CDs comes from a column on computers in
the Village Voice, Mr. Roboto, 18 September 2003.
6 See Lev Manovichs Theory of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000)
for a more lengthy analysis of how avant-garde film practices predicate ideas
embedded in the digital explosion, how a library of film facts parallels the
idea of data bank, and how films ability to transpose, invert, insert, and
move non-linearly in the editing process etches out decades earlier these
same processes in the digital revolution that takes place at the end of the
twentieth century.
7 From an interview conducted in September 2003 via e-mail with Jeremy
Rigsby, Media City Program Director, Windsor, Ontario, for publication in
XX, a quarterly published by the Windsor Feminist Theatre (winter 2004).
6 From Photography to Imography: New Media

as Metaphor
ron b u r n e tt
Introduction
Discussions of digital aesthetics in the context of new media tend to
focus on characteristics that are for the most part drawn from previous
media and art forms. The question is: are digital forms of expression
genuinely transforming traditional forms of representation and expression from literature to media?1 Are we dealing with a new set of phenomena and practices that require a different approach to the analysis
of digital cultures and the discourses and representations that they produce? The answers to these questions may well be found in new ways
of thinking about the photographic foundation upon which so much
traditional and new media are built. My response to these questions has
been to develop some new terms that, for me, explain more easily the
synthesis of new media with conventional forms of expression that use
images. I offer these for debate and discussion. I am convinced that new
discourses are needed. This essay tests out that claim.
One of the central characteristics of new media, especially with
respect to spectators, that Lev Manovich discusses in his book The Language of New Media is the change from viewer to user.2 Most of the
literature on new media carves out similar distinctions old media are
for passive viewing and new media allow for, even encourage, interaction or use. User is not a term I am comfortable with, not only
because it is derived from the early days of research in the computer
sciences,3 but also because it constrains our understanding of how
computers actually work, as well as how humans use them. The term
user refers to how people interact with the screened interfaces of a
computer and what they do or accomplish in the process. As a term, it
127
actually devalues the intricacy of interaction because it narrows down

the complexity of humancomputer relations as well as simplifying
our understanding of human subjectivity.4 This narrowing is largely
the result of fundamental misunderstandings of the role of spectators,
navigators, and surfers in generating their own experiences in viewing
any form of media expression.5 In other words, I do not believe that
people who interact with media are just using the technology. The term
is just too reductive to explain the complex relationship people have
with images irrespective of their digital or analogue origins.
The more puzzling and important question is why the cultural
notion of use has become such a normative constituent of the thinking
around interactive media in general. Manovichs suggestion that the
move to user is a defining moment that distinguishes new media from
old is steeped in a set of assumptions about human experience that are
at best behavioural in orientation and, at worst, extremely reductive.
Part of the reason for this is that the engineers and computer
scientists who have been largely responsible for the creation of digital
technologies think about the communication of information through
models that treat knowledge as a purely cognitive phenomenon,6
which feeds into a limited and limiting understanding of the complexity of human interaction with digital media. There is an unproblematic
understanding of the way in which information and experience contribute to the development of knowledge and human understanding. Forsythe also suggests that for knowledge engineers, thought and action
are isomorphic, and there is a guiding assumption that knowledge is
conscious.7 In short, Forsythe continues, to knowledge engineers,
knowledge means explicit, globally applicable rules whose relation
to each other and to implied action is straightforward. Knowledge in
this sense is a stable entity that can be acquired and transferred.8 The
user operationalizes the scenarios that have been put in place for him or
her, and this is described as interaction. The problem is that new media
are supposedly about completely different paradigms of interaction
that radically alter the ways in which meaning, communication, and
reflection are pursued. If the knowledge model is so weak, then the
challenge to find new discursive models will require us to revisit conventional notions of interaction as enunciated by the creators of the
technology.
Tor Nrretranders makes the claim that the concept of user is a metaphor for a series of activities that are part illusion and part reality. The
graphic user interface (GUI) on a computer, for example, is a visualiza-
128 Ron Burnett
tion of computer functions. There is not really a garbage bin to throw

out files. There is a hard disk, but an icon is hardly a representation of
its complexity. There are not folders and so on. Computers are about
electrical interactions and the speed of connection between ones and
zeroes. The interface is just a convenience, but it is essential to the
humanization of the experience. The question is: what are you doing
when you manipulate the GUI of your computer? When you are playing a computer game and using a joystick are you actually moving
characters on the screen? Or are you playing within a fairly limited set
of variables that generate the illusion of choice? Do these questions
matter if the illusions work?
The GUI (or the dock or the window) is taken as evidence for a series
of hierarchical organizing principles that are supposedly mirrored in
use. In other words, the visualization of computer functioning through
a series of iconic representations suggests more about human expectations than about the computer itself. For the purposes of this essay, it is
necessary to recognize that the metaphor of use has infiltrated all
aspects of new media. It is an irony that even the most sophisticated of
experiments in virtual reality rely on forms of visualization that are
derived from initial interactions, development, and creativity at the GUI
level. (Even the most sophisticated animations begin their lives within
the confines of two-dimensional, GUI-based spaces.)9
In response to these issues, I believe that we need to fundamentally
rethink how images have evolved since the invention of photography
in light of what new media technologies are suggesting about their
function and purpose, and about audiences. It is only when the history
of images their evolution and aesthetic patterns are firmly situated
in the context of new media that we may be able to argue persuasively
for some of the transformative shifts that digital technologies are
engendering. This is as much a claim for the importance of new media
as it is an attempt to question whether radical innovation is in fact one
of its characteristics.10
If we are in the midst of a revolution, then one of the main elements
of that change will be found in what people do with the media they
encounter on a daily basis. We need to inform the examination of these
issues with more interdisciplinary work that makes use of lessons
learned from the social sciences and the humanities as well as engineering and the computer sciences.
Another line of argument about new media makes claims about
changes in the ways in which the human body is perceived and experi-
129
enced within virtual environments.11 Yet, too little is presently known

about the interactions of perception, physical sensation, information,
and awareness in digital spaces to give these arguments real substance.
Even in those areas of the cognitive sciences where great strides have
been made, an understanding of how mind and body interact to make
sense of sensation remains a subject of debate and dissension.12
I am not suggesting that wearing a helmet and engaging with a
virtual space (see, in particular, the work of Char Davies) are simply
duplications of previous forms of media practice and experience.
Rather, digital technologies need to be contextualized within a historical framework of human experience and immersion within media of all
types. Thus, the clear links between performance, rituals, theatre, the
circus, painting, and what we are describing as immersive, virtual
experiences need to be brought into the foreground of critical work on
digital technologies.13
Is there something specific about new media that shifts the parameters of human perception beyond what conventional media have provided? If the answer to this question is yes, then what methods of
study are available to examine these changes? If, for example, telepresence signals a move from proximal relations to more distant ones, then
how do we evaluate that shift? Telepresence ranges from the use of an
avatar as a representative of a human player in a game to doctors who
examine patients from a distance. What are the modalities of interaction within a computer game that make use of avatars or the remote
manipulation of a robotic arm to perform surgery on a patient? What
are the implications of these activities for conventional definitions of
the human body and for the ways in which images are used as devices
of interaction?
It is ironic that, within this evolving and complex area, the aesthetic
base for most of new media remains photographic. That is, even the
screen of a computer and the interface that provides access to its parts is
structured along a compositional framework that is two-dimensional.
It must also be remembered that the icons of a GUI are for the most part
titled to make sure that the meaning is clear. Flat surfaces have a variety
of visual constraints that upset the hierarchical order needed to operate
within the visual space of the computer. This is really a photographic
space, and it is powerful precisely because the discourse that we have
available to analyse its meanings is both established and full of acceptable conventions.
However, have the underlying characteristics of digital technologies
130 Ron Burnett
changed the way photographic/image environments operate?14 In

other words, what happens to a two-dimensional GUI in a context
that is increasingly driven by more and more complex forms of visualization?
Imographs
This then leads me to ask whether we have moved from the era of photographs to that of imographs (pronounced eye-mographs).15 I have
chosen to combine image and photograph into imograph as a way of
acknowledging the foundational role of photos in the development of
digital media. Imographs are images that can be transformed through
the use of software within digital environments. Imographs also refer
to the power of morphing and the ability to introduce a high degree of
elasticity into digital images. Photographs and images of all sorts, from
still to moving, no longer exist in isolation from the many different
ways in which they can be transformed and networked. Imography is
a term that brings photography into a close and interdependent relationship with the word image and that recognizes the foundational
role now played by digital tools in the creation and dissemination of
meaning and messages.
Imographs can be placed into real-time contexts, changed, and
manipulated by a variety of real and potential authors. Imographs can
simultaneously be in many places at once and move in and out of different software programs; therefore, authorship in the traditional sense
is transformed. This fluidity challenges not only meaning, but also
conventional notions of representation. Moving images have always
been kinetic, but what happens when still images can be converted into
pieces and then layered into other images, or even become the basis for
a series of moving images?16
Distinctions between still and moving images also lessen in the
world of imography (witness the still-photo function in most DV camcorders), in large measure because digital images are essentially highquality video images. The dynamic interplay of software and imographs means that conventional notions of look and feel are disrupted.
What happens when imographs are produced from the interactions of
computer programs without the direct intervention of humans? To
what degree are digital cameras out of the control of imographers and
as a result reconfiguring some fundamental ideas about photography
and human subjectivity?17
131
As I have mentioned, most of the technologies used to create digital

forms of expression as well as different forms of digital communication
are based on two-dimensional, GUI-based creative environments. (3-D
work continues to remain at the margins of creative activity in the arts
and media.) Screens that is, the screen of a computer or video monitor
largely define these activities. Nevertheless, these two-dimensional
environments have facilitated the creation of a multiplicity of expressive forms that include the body, voice, sound, images, language,
movement, music, and so forth. This is an interdisciplinary space,
bound to time with more and more layers of artifice built into the very
fabric of the work.18
Waking Life
In the world of imography, it is possible for all of these elements to form
the foundation for a new aesthetic in which clarity, for example, or clear
focus is not a requirement for the imographs to be used for communicative purposes. Digital media depend on the continual fluidity and
shifting expressiveness of imographs in motion. One of the best examples of this is the recent film Waking Life by Richard Linklater (2001),
which uses digital video and rotoscoping to remake video images into
imographs. Waking Life moves between digital video and animation
such that it is possible to see both forms at play at the same time.19
Even more important is the shifting nature of space and time within the
world of the characters and the way the imographs become concrete
visualizations of their inner states.
Another example is computer games, which are not just images in
motion, played with and manipulated by players. The games are about
a completely different use of colour and form, composition and graphic
design, which gives meaning to movements and exchanges that are
often unpredictable but also, to some degree, in the control of players.
In other words, the aesthetic is defined by the orientation of the playerscreen-design space a space that, in fact, is not using the traditional
parameters of the screen to achieve its results. The arrival of haptic
interfaces for games and other forms of physical manipulation will further break down the boundaries between screens and humans to
enhance the fluidity as well as unpredictability of potential outcomes to
imographic processes. Visualization and experience combine in new
aesthetic forms of expression and representation.
A further example is editing film or video using digital tools. (The
132 Ron Burnett
use of Final Cut Pro to edit a film is not just a duplication of what might
have been done with machines like a Steenbeck or a Moviola.) What do
virtual fish swimming in a virtual fish tank look like? What kinds of
discourses are we developing to deal with increasingly intelligent
objects like the Sony robotic dog Aibo? What does it mean to visualize
the human body through techniques that have been drawn from holography? Remote sensing permits the visualization of contexts that are far
removed from the viewer, yet, at the same time, the construction of the
screen space allows for interaction. What must be understood in all of
this is that representational and symbolic processes have been transformed into geometric and mathematical activities. Can we talk about
an aesthetic of the mathematical? Should we?20 Imagine a context
within which you could actually, physically pick up a mathematical
symbol and then throw it into a space and watch the symbol morph
into a character. This is precisely the kind of dynamic media environment that begins to describe the aesthetic potential of imographic activities and is, quite appropriately, at the centre of the aesthetic concerns of
the Matrix series of films.
Aesthetics
As the digital infiltrates every aspect of our lives, transforming objects
into intelligent vehicles for visualization and representation, the question of aesthetics will become ever more urgent. For example, what will
happen when a fridge is given the ability to talk? Will we begin to wonder about its shape and colour in a completely different way? If televisions are going to make choices for us based on our viewing patterns,
are we going to have to rethink what we mean by television screens?
What happens when rendering processes create three-dimensional
worlds inside computers? Can the polygons that are the basis for the
creative work here become the objects of analysis and critique?
All of these questions need to be explored with a different set of discourses from the past and a heightened sense of the radical transformations that digital forms of expression are making possible. Digital tools
are changing the landscape of expression and creativity, not only in the
arts but in every cultural form. It will be necessary to respond with new
critical languages and new categories if we are to critique digital cultures with more than just a descriptive response or a duplication of previous models of aesthetic analysis (fig. 6.1).
133
Fig 6.1 This is a good example of an imograph. It was created using Photoshop. Does this mean that the word text is different when placed on this page
using Microsoft Word than when placed within the context of a JPEG built
using the tools of a graphics program? Are all of the variables different enough
here to suggest that the word text has become an aesthetic object? How does
this differ from what the poet ee cummings did with words on a page? In the
first instance, both the word processor and Photoshop encourage manipulation, transformation, and playfulness. The screen turns into a canvas with
powerful tools including the possible use of network-based elements. Second,
the fact that figure 6.1 is a file means that it can be converted and changed further by anyone. As a file, it is just data. On the printed page, it turns into a
more fixed form, but now can be scanned into a computer and, once again,
become data. It is this set of possibilities and potential shifts (both in character
and quality as well as location) that make figure 6.1 an imograph.
134 Ron Burnett
Transformations
The key term here is variables. Within the context of the computer that
I am using, it would be possible to add sound to fig. 6.1. It would also
be possible to extract the imograph and move it to another program. In
other words, unlike the book that you are holding in your hands, all of
the elements of fig. 6.1 can be transformed. Now, it can be argued that a
Xerox copy of the page in which this illustration appears has many of
the same possibilities. This is true. The distinguishing factor is that the
computer builds all of these variables into its operations. Many different stages of creativity can be developed, imagined, and generated
within a time frame that is compressed and very fluid. Digital environments build on these potential transformations, and, as more and more
texts and images appear within computerized environments, the role of
the printed page will change into an artifact with many variables in
other words, the printed page will become more fluid.
I would go further and suggest that digital technologies encourage
transformative and playful forms of interaction. This in no way precludes the fact that the same activities can be pursued using analogue
tools. It is simply that an imograph housed within a computer becomes,
as I have said, the equivalent of data, and this makes it possible to
reduce or to expand upon all of its elements instantaneously. The material of the digital world is radically different from conventional materials, and the results are a variety of windows, maps, and configurations
of information that often defy easy classification. Fig. 6.1 was created
using a series of mathematically defined codes that translate fragments
of an image into a series of ones and zeroes. The presence of the underlying code has no material impact on the relationship viewers or readers develop with the imograph, in large measure because it is invisible.
In other words, it is not possible for me to recode the programming
logic of Photoshop, and yet my use of some of its elements binds me to
the program and many of its aesthetic assumptions (fig. 6.2).
Networks
I would suggest that imographs no longer operate outside of the networks into which they can be placed. This will have a profound impact
on potential interlocutors and also on the nature of the viewing process. It means that the reproduction of imographs can take place within
so many different venues, and using so many different tools, that the
135
Fig 6.2 This imograph was taken using a digital camera at low resolution. It
was loaded into a Macintosh G4 and further altered within Photoshop. It was
then imported into Microsoft Word. In the digital world, I could send this imograph via e-mail and ask for feedback or place it onto a Web page. On the
printed page, the feedback can only be asynchronous. On a computer this
image can be e-mailed to another individuals graphics program and then
altered in a variety of unpredictable ways. This is very similar to sampling in
music, and there are resonances with the process of creating a collage in analogue media. This ability to borrow from a variety of different sources is made
easier within digital environments in part because of the fluid way in which
imographs and sounds can be networked.
136 Ron Burnett
various stages of creation, production, and dissemination move further

and further away from any initial context, raising important questions
about history and meaning. The distance of imographs from the time
during which they were taken to further production and then interaction can be as broad as is needed and as narrow as the imographer
demands. Compare this with the constraints of painting, sculpture,
and more traditional forms of expression that are beholden to galleries,
museums, and other institutions of display. The difference with imographs is that uniqueness and originality are far less important than
networking. Distribution and dissemination are foundational rather
than an outcome of the creative process.
Creative Projects and Imographs
In order to understand these changes let me focus on a few examples of
works that explore the multi-dimensional layers that I have been discussing.
(1) Dinner Table #1 is a table and a machine that listens in on table
talk, spins stories according to the events surrounding it, and translates
these events into interactive games.21 Imographic spaces are about the
possible eruption of meaning from objects. The table becomes intelligent to the extent that the imographs visualize both the game and peoples reactions to the games.
As a result, objects become possible sites of visualization. The screen
is no longer a privileged entry point for experience.
(2) Sinking is an interactive video installation that seeks to explore
how diving under the water can act to slow your body down into a
relaxed contemplative state. You walk into a room, which has two rearprojection screens floating in a space; projected on these screens are
images of waves lapping around you as if your head was just at the surface of the water. The light and colours from these reflect around the
space, which becomes one full of flickering light. When you stop moving, the image shows you dropping down to the bottom of the sea.
Compared to the other images, the images are still and the sounds are
softer and slower. The still greens of the image reflect around the space.
Then, when you move again, the space erupts in a jolt and the images
return to the surface. The system takes into account whether or not you
are moving more or less than the average visitor to the work. So if you
are slower to move and stand still for some time, then the overall
images and sounds are softer.22
137
Fig 6.3 Stereogram from Microworlds, Sirens and Argonauts, 1997,

Agueda Sim.
This piece is open to change as the participant moves around in it.

It remains intensely metaphoric; however, the notion that images
respond to movement and that meaning changes according to the
type of motion suggests that imographs no longer need to be fixed.
This installation is about navigation as much as it is about creating a
new kind of imographic landscape and is akin to the work of Bill Viola.
(3) Microworlds, Sirens and Argonauts introduces the concept of
living narrative landscapes: virtual spaces that allow users to successfully construct their own navigational maps and to build their own
representational models that can co-exist with the narrative of the environments. Thus, the virtual space becomes a living narrative landscape
as the Argonauts (users) navigate along time and space, taking part in
the complex visual and aural behaviours of the environments.23
The flexible articulation and visualization of meaning through a
combination of different colours and shapes now moves from the
screened space to a living narrative landscape. Imographs use objects,
images, and sounds to envision an aesthetic that becomes an on-thefly dynamic expression of an ecological experience. The Argonauts
choreograph not only their own physical movements, but the imographs as well (fig. 6.3).
(4) The Iliad Project (2002) performance architecture by Jeff Burke,
Adam Shive, Jared Stein. This new work is being constructed as a process that the audience intersects with and influences, not simply a single, repeated performance that uses new technology. It will merge an
on-line exploration of the world of the piece with a combination of
interactive galleries and performance spaces. Through careful integration of a database of audience information, sensing and image capture
138 Ron Burnett
technology, and dynamically processed media, the piece will engage

the audience-participants by modifying its own text and design elements based on the groups of people who visit the website and attend a
particular performance.24
The Iliad Project makes active use of another crucial characteristic of
imographic media: databases. As more information is gathered about
participants, their activities and actions become part of the memory of
the performance. The computer can then translate these data into rudimentary scenarios. The process builds upon itself with the result that
generations of audiences interact without necessarily knowing what
they have shared and why. Even more interesting is the relationship
that is developed between the remoteness of the Web and the immediacy of the performance.
(5) Blue Window Pane is a CAVE virtual reality art experience that
includes networking, live video, and sound-activated graphics. Participants explore and actively ignite events to gain a knowledge base
through exploration and perceptual interaction. Events are triggered by
the participants approach to an object. Proximity or waving the navigation wand causes the environment to react and demand reaction. The
CG characters are activated by the music dancing to its rhythms and
beats (fig. 6.4).25
Like many experiments in this area, the goal of Blue Window Pane is
participation. The difference is that the CAVE environment increases
the degree of immersion because most of the space is screens. Different
levels of dimensionality are added through 3-D glasses and various
pointers. The most important element of this example is the responsiveness of the avatars. As with computer and video games as well as online games, the desire is to move from outside of the screen into the
actual virtual environment. The screen becomes both a tissue and a barrier: what artists like Dolinsky are trying to do is break down the differences between the real and virtual.
Conclusion
In all of the above examples, reality and its virtual offshoots co-exist,
and this may well be one of the crucial outcomes of digital processes.
However, when the activities of computers take on an automatic role,
that is, going beyond the parameters that have been entered into the
coding of a program, imographs become the interface to meaning. Due
to the mathematical nature of digital technologies, programmers can
139
Fig 6.4 Blue Window Pane (CAVE), Margaret Dolinsky (used with permission).
create a series of random interactions among various strings of code.

Random interactions produce unpredictable results. In some senses, an
evolutionary process develops, and, through it, some experiments have
produced generations of imographs representing a physical output that
could not have been achieved any other way.26 Generally, the imographs are non-figurative. It is hard to imagine a process that would
evolve with enough consistency to produce an interesting and original
figure. What I am getting at here is the manner in which increasingly
complex physical forms approximating human shapes and looks have
become the holy grail of imographers. The drive to reproduce the
human body within imographic spaces is a rearguard action, because
imographs inevitably shift bodies into data and then into form. The aesthetic power will come from the strength of the narrative and not necessarily from a naturalist approach.
Imographs presage an era of exploration when it will be possible to
touch images and grasp their physical form. Notions of content, infor-
140 Ron Burnett
mation, and knowledge will have to change in order to accommodate

the drive to create a new aesthetic. Imography will increasingly reflect
the variables of multimedia mixing and pastiche, and, in some senses,
any aspect of life will be open to inclusion within digital environments.
This will challenge not only what we mean by the real, but also what
we mean by content, communications, and learning. Perhaps we need
to transform the engineering term user into learner. After all, new discourses are most effective when they encourage learning. Imography
may well be the first stage in a long-term evolution that will transform
humancomputer interaction into unpredictable forms of learning and
experience.
NOTES
1 Janet Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997); Lev Manovich, The Language of New
Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001).
2 Manovich, Language of New Media, 205.
3 M. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution
That Made Computing Personal (New York: Viking, 2001).
4 Tor Nrretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size
(New York: Viking, 1998).
5 See the first chapters of Ronald Burnett, Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and
the Imaginary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995) for an exploration of these issues.
6 Diana Forsythe, Studying Those Who Study Us: An Anthropologist in the
World of Artificial Intelligence (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
2001), 52.
7 Ibid., 523.
8 Ibid., 53.
9 Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance
of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
10 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media
11 Ken Hillis, Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
12 Gerald Edelman and Jean-Pierre Changeux, eds, The Brain (London: Transaction Publishers, 2001); Brian Cantwell Smith, On the Origin of Objects
141
13 Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2003).
14 Marie-Laure Ryan, Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in
Literature and Electronic Media (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001).
15 William J. Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic
Era (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
16 N. Katherine Hayles, Writing Machines (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
17 Patrick Maynard, The Engine of Visualization: Thinking through Photography
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
18 Steven Holzman, Digital Mosaics: The Aesthetics of Cyberspace (New York:
Touchtone, 1997).
19 For further information on this extraordinary film, go to http://www.
wakinglifemovie.com/.
20 Edward Tufte, Envisioning Information (Cheshire, CT: Graphics Press, 1990).
21 Marc Bhlen, http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/%7Ebohlen/
dinnerTable.htm (site now discontinued).
22 Robin Petterd, The Language of Interactivity in the Context of Immersive
Video and Sound Installations (31 May 2001), http://www.otheredge.com.au/exchange/writing/language_of_interactivity.htm.
23 Aguedo Simo, Microworlds, Sirens and Argonauts, http://anim.usc.edu/
simo/.
24 Fabian Wagmister, Jeff Burke, et al., Networked Multi-Sensory Experiences:
Beyond Browsers on the Web and in the Museum, Museums and the Web
2002, http://www.archimuse.com/mw2002/papers/wagmister/
wagmister.html.
25 Margaret Dolinsky, Blue Window Pane CAVE Art Environment, http://
dolinsky.fa.indiana.edu/bwp/synopsis.html.
26 Gary Greenfield, Simulated Aesthetics and Evolving Artworks: A Coevolutionary Approach, Leonardo 35, no. 3 (2002): 2839.
PART II
Digital Time Archive
The second section of the book moves from spatially based considerations to notions of time, memory, and history. The politics of time
underscores much of modernity, especially in regards to technology:
labour value, commodity culture, leisure time, and the digital
diaspora of the maquiladoras and the urban unemployed. The power
to fill or empty time, to value it unequally across classes and peoples,
has specific implications for culture. Considering contemporary
worlds, Homi Bhabha has warned of a danger that the presentism
of the net may drain everyday life of its historical memory.1 This historical memory itself was, of course, never free of mediations; whether
of national, gendered, or class-based inequities and fantasies, the processes through which memory becomes illuminated as history have
been formed by contestation, by struggle. The essays in this section are
concerned with warnings such as those voiced by Bhabha and, as such,
ask questions about the cultural and/or gender bases of the history,
memory, and identity nexus. The writers go beyond the polarized
arguments about technology, especially in regards to gender, globalization, and the devastation of cultural differences rooted in traditions
that are not part of Western or masculinist precepts.
1 Homi Bhabha, preface to Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of Place, ed.
Hamid Naficy (London: Routledge, 1999), viii.
7 Feminist Digital Aesthetics:

The Everyday and Yesterday
cai tlin fis her
Im trying to explain core imagery to an Introduction to Womens Studies class as part of my Why have there been no great women artists
lecture. I arrive at the 1970s, peel off a layer of clothing to reveal my lavender Calyx Retrospective T-shirt. Its got a huge vagina on it, with little
flower petals around the edges. Whats that? says a girl in the front
who should know better. I want to hand her a speculum. Its a vagina,
I explain, patiently. Some students in the back stifle a euuuw. I lift a
copy of Tee Corrinnes Cunt Coloring Book off the podium. (On the back
it reads: Womens Studies. Adults only. XXX. I dont want to get too
off-track unpacking this. Just show the pictures.) Core imagery, I start
again, vaginas, flowers, seashells recall Judy Chicagos The Dinner
Party ... (I click the image on the screen). See, look closely every plate
has a famous womans vagina on it. Euuuwwwww! Okay, I begin
again, why would artists want to use this kind of imagery? What was
going on politically at the time? What do you remember about feminism in this period? A hand shoots up: Georgia OKeeffe? Hmmm.
Lets get back to that. Others? How quickly things are lost.
And how odd it was for me, then, at the turn of the millennium,1 to
find so much of this lost feminism again, online, proliferating in feminist hypertexts. An uncanny number of women working online were
describing digital writing technologies through the invocation of second-wave feminist terms like the everyday, womens time, and
embodiment, and contrasting these with the demands of geometric
space and linear time, often posited as masculine. And while some
hypermedia works I was exploring did use fragmented writing spaces
and multivocal narratives to deconstruct Woman, there was less interest in deconstructing her than you might imagine. Alongside hybrid
146 Caitlin Fisher
ontologies and experimental narratives, I found, online, a widespread

return in digital hypermedia practice to standard 1970s female themes:
cooking and recipes, ephemera, family albums, recovery of lost herstories, body art, criture feminine, small stories, and interior spaces the
everyday all woven together with striking consistency. This digital
work recalled the theoretical and practical preoccupations of much
1970s feminist artistic practice and constitutes a return to what would
seem to be a feminist yesterday, complete with core imagery, consciousness-raising manifestos, herstory archives, and women-only spaces.
Perhaps its not much of a surprise that issues and strategies and theories that exist outside hypertextual discourses would also be present
within them. Surely not. But I was curious as to why this theoretical and
political moment was seemingly privileged, even in the face of more
contemporary feminist theoretical preoccupations the difference
debates, performativity, and anti-essentialism coming immediately to
mind. Why here? Why now? And to what effect?
Online, a flirtation with essentialism in discussions about technology is
easy to find. Hypertext practitioner Carolyn Guyer writes, for example:
When I first began using hypertext almost ten years ago, I believed it was
natural, designed to work associatively, as the human brain does. I still
believe something like that, but amplified ... From those first days till now,
I have continued to see this medium as very life-like. I see it in the form of
a quotidian stream. The gossip, family discussions, letters, passing fancies,
and daydreams that we tell ourselves every day in order to make sense of
things ... We live and make our stories in a line of time that wraps and
loops on itself, trying to contend with the geometries of space we also
inhabit. Affected by nearby hues we cannot or will not understand, we follow our influences, oppose, match, and continue, even in an electronic
milieu, to measure with our bodies.2
And Guyer is certainly not the only woman to describe digital writing
technologies in terms of the body and womens everyday. Hypertext
author Judy Malloy writes, along the same lines, hypernarratives imitate the associative, contingent flow of human thought and the unpredictable progression of our lives.3 While the mapping of this
technology with the body is famously found as far back as 1945 in
media pioneer Vannevar Bushs As We May Think,4 we do find the
argument gendered in interesting ways. The gendering is implicit in
Feminist Digital Aesthetics: The Everyday and Yesterday
147
the texts above, but theorist Sadie Plant makes the connection between
multitasking hypermedia and the feminine explicit: Think of the difference between DOS and Windows and youll see that the future is
female.5
Core imagery abounds, too. Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petrys
hypertext Izme Pass, for example, is a collaborative response to
Michael Joyces hypertext WOE, or a Memory of What Will Be
indeed, Izme Pass subsumes WOE within its structure. Written using
Storyspace, a hypertext authoring package with a spatial interface
(each hypertext screen is represented by small boxes that can be moved
around to form diagrams and images), Guyer and Petry rewrite Joyces
mandala layout with their own: a diamond- or o- or almond-shaped
map headed by a Mandorla, the Asiatic signifier of the yoni, the divine
female genital.6 Shelley Jacksons online hypertext My Body: A
Wunderkammer contains the following vivid invocation of criture feminine: My vagina had rewritten Joyce. It was then I knew I was going to
be a writer.7 The allusion is certainly to James Joyce, but possibly to
Michael Joyce, as well, rewritten and swallowed up, as you recall, by
Guyer and Petrys text. And VNS Matrix, an Australian group, writes,
in their Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,
we are the modern cunt
positive anti reason
unbounded, unleashed, unforgiving
we see art with our cunt
we make art with our cunt
we believe in jouissance madness holiness and poetry
we are the virus of the new world disorder
rupturing the symbolic from within
saboteurs of big daddy mainframe
the clitoris is a direct line to the matrix.8
This kind of radical feminist discourse, while never disappearing

entirely, has long fallen out of favour. Indeed, the feminism I ended up
teaching arguably less lyrical and decidedly less sure-footed, unable
to be women-centred in part because poststructuralism had taught us
that there were no women really struggled explicitly against this kind
of formulation, against the uncomplicated dualisms and the unabashed
acceptance of a chaotic, intuitive power originating from within
womens bodies themselves.
148 Caitlin Fisher
As I continued to explore hypertexts online, I found dozens of examples of pieces that seemed politically and aesthetically anachronistic
action taking place in the womens spaces of kitchens and bedrooms
as if the publicprivate split were only now being considered and interrogated for the first time, rather than thirty years ago in important
visual art, feminist video work, as well as political texts. Flash animations of bodies, bodies, and more bodies, seashells, the ocean, vagina as
interface, images of naked women floating through the air it was Judy
Chicagos The Dinner Party all over again, and even if the plates were
more vagina dentata this time, this widespread attention to woman
versus big daddy mainframe, this allegiance to gender binaries,
would seem to beg critical intervention. Jouissance, madness, holiness,
and poetry we could use more of, undoubtedly, but what about the difference debates? What about the feminism that moved beyond this
kind of essentialism and this kind of dualism?
What might the return of these familiar themes and devices in hypermedia in the year 2000 signal? The computer seemed, to me, a fluid
screen, indeed, through which these themes had passed, apparently
effortlessly across a generation, uninfluenced by thirty years of debate.
Did the appearance of these texts point to a calculated rejection of contemporary feminist theoretical preoccupations? To ignorance of key
issues in Western feminism? Were they an expression of a longing I had
yet to identify?
My first thought was that these hypertexts should be read as being as
much about nostalgia as about the future. And it was impossible for me
to discount the fact that so many of these hypertexts were apparently
being produced by white women. Blair and Takayoshi remind us that
the Web is yet another cultural site where users are bombarded with
representations of women based more on an essentialist definition of
woman than the lives of real women from varying cultural backgrounds.9 And Faith Wilding, a feminist artist active in the 1970s
(famous for her knitted womb roomat Womanspace) and one of the
very few of those women working with electronic media today, has also
observed that a more negative cycle is also repeating itself, as the
women who have found their way into cyberterritories are generally
those who have economic and cultural advantages in other territories.10 Issues of sameness and access to cultural texts and production
become urgent again.
Culture is tied, of course, to a sense of place to home home as a site
of exploration, negotiation, and cultural reproduction. Perhaps more
149
hauntingly, of course, culture is tied to an imperial centre, too. When I

first encountered feminism, there was an often publicly expressed feeling of homecoming. There wasnt much public discussion until later, of
course, about who exactly felt at home in that second-wave feminism
and why, or about how those who found feminism as theorized then so
comforting could possibly imagine that some women found the theoretical as well as the physical spaces of feminism uninviting, disappointing, or irrelevant. Maybe it should come as no surprise to find texts
that suggest, at least to me, a certain longing for the feminisms we who
felt at home fifteen years ago knew before sexuality and gender were
uncoupled, when something like the sisterhood still seemed viable.
Nostalgia perhaps isnt surprising. After all, were already living The
Retro Apocalypse, according to one writer, where there is such a glut of
nostalgia that we get so nostalgic for nostalgia that culture implodes.11
What WAS nostalgia? asks Linda Hutcheon, pointedly, going on to
identify its Greek roots nostos, meaning to return home and algos,
meaning pain. Homesickness, then. Hutcheon continues:
Nostalgia requires the availability of evidence of the past, and it is precisely the electronic and mechanical reproduction of images of the past
that plays such an important role in the structuring of the nostalgic imagination today ... Thanks to CD ROM technology and, before that, audio
and video reproduction, nostalgia no longer has to rely on individual
memory or desire: it can be fed forever by quick access to an infinitely
recyclable past.12
Consciousness-Raising
Its not surprising, then, perhaps, that we witness indulgence for those
narratives of feminism for which we remain nostalgic. And some feminists make the connection between the kinds of practices hypertext
enables and the nostalgia it can trigger explicit: Australian feminist theorist Susan Hawthorne, for example, in words resonant with Guyers
assertion that hypertext as a technology is particularly feministfriendly, notes that hypertext is described as a practice wherein ideas
of centre, margin, hierarchy, and linearity are replaced by multilinearity, nodes, links and networks. She writes:
Apart from multilinearity these were words in common usage among
feminists in the 1970s, and multilinearity certainly describes what we were
150 Caitlin Fisher

doing in consciousness-raising groups and collectives. We were privileging the previously unheard, unspoken, unimportant, linking with one
another through common or different experience, making associations
across those experiences and expanding those associations into a cultural
life which was built on a strange scaffold that only we could see as it
slowly grew into what we now know as a culture centred on womens
experience.13
Online, we return, as Hawthorne suggests, to the consciousness-raising

(CR) group: I have this theory, one online journal manifesto reads, we
could take events in our own lives, which have mystified us since their
occurrence, and search the Web for similar encounters. We could compare and contrast others experiences and draw deeper meaning into
our own experience. We might too, find the one piece of information
that will transform an experience we had nearly forgotten into a life
changing moment which has been waiting years to unfold.14 It certainly sounds like a consciousness-raising manifesto, except that rather
than have twelve women sitting in your kitchen, the members of your
CR group would be an unknown quantity. What could be better than
hypertext? writes one Net observer, to engage the too long either-or of
writing as personal expression vs. writing as public discourse? Writing
as process? What else is HTML?15
But consciousness-raising groups have been critically observed to
work best when their participants are fairly homogeneous (that happened to me exactly the same way).
Archives
Some feminists online aim to construct new narratives and stories
or resistance new wholes replacing holes encyclopedic,
accessible, consciousness-raising. These digital projects often collect
individual womens authentic personal stories creating archived,
encyclopedic sites that aim to tell collective truths. Abbe Dons site
Bubbes Back Porch, for example, invites women from around the world
[to share] stories in real time and then post them to Bubbes Back Porch.
If you want to add a story, you can simply email your text and a digitized photo (if you have one) to bubbe@bubbe.com. The stories here
foreground womens roles as mother, as daughter, as Jewish. A picture
of Matzo Ball mix alerts us to a repetition of familiar domestic themes:
birth stories, death stories, grandmother stories, the sharing of recipes
151
and wisdom among a community of women. Bubbe writes: Nothing

makes me kvell more than seeing people connect with a dormant part
of themselves or their past. Ever since I began putting stories on the
Web, I realized theres something about stories that enable us to learn
from each other and make a connection between our heads, our hearts
and our kishkes. Bubbes Back Porch also urges women to meet face-toface, too, like a quilting bee.16
Another example of an encyclopedic, consciousness-raising site,
Mother Millennia, gathers stories about mothers. Themes on this extensive site include adoption, biography, stories of pregnancy and birth,
food, grandmothers, and oral history.17 After you visit the mother
archive, visit the World Lesbian Biography site with its archived stories
of Home / Dream / Style / Sex / Biography / Politics / Art / Relationships / Adventure. MEMORY IS CORRUPTIBLE, the site proclaims in
menacing CAPS, STRUGGLE TO REMEMBER CONSTRUCT AN
ARCHIVE.18 What is striking, given current feminist projects aimed at
deconstructing identities and challenging even the building of narratives or bodies to inhabit, is the lack of critical framework offered by the
women constructing these archives.
What past is being valued here? What kind of culture is being supported and reproduced in these homepages? Whom are we saving for?
And what do we tell ourselves about these collections, these theoretical
homes, these spaces of comfort, meeting places of sisters whose visions
of the world were coincident with what youd known all along but had
never before communicated: this feminist culture? Perhaps this online
work, like early CR groups, allows privileged women to find one
another to theorize (and problematically generalize) on the basis of that
experience.
I just found it around the house
Like much second-wave feminist aesthetic practice think video, collage work, and so forth many feminist hypertexts make use of recipes,
ephemera, and, perhaps especially, family photographs. Collections of
family pictures have been noted as strengthening the metaphor of
home online. I would say traditionally that it has been the women in
families who organize and cherish the family photo albums, writes
Dawn Stoppiello in the Gender & Identity in New Media: Open
Forum bulletin board. I like the idea of Web pages as the fat photo wallets my adolescent friends and I carried in the 1950s, mini-shrines we
152 Caitlin Fisher
whipped out of our gigantic purses, seemingly personal but made for
show. Perhaps its not surprising that so many feminist hypertexts
make use of family photographs.19 The fat photo wallet is deployed
again in Judy Malloys fictional Its Name Was Penelope, a text that makes
extensive use of photographs. In the work, old photos represent individual memories whose associations are changed each reading as the
photographs are constantly shuffled by the computer.20 While her work
has been compared to the cinematographic montages of Trinh T MinhHas films in which fragmentation and discontinuity simultaneously
lead to opening spaces for multiple readings,21 this kind of digital photographic practice, especially given its thematic relationship to private
domestic space, resonates at the same time with earlier, less experimental feminist work like collage work and quilting, in which the personal
and the visual meet.
Recovering Herstories
Third Generation: A Website Project on Family Photographs and the Rhetoric
of Memories of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust is a lifewriting website
project by Rachel Schreiber, Andrea Slane, and Jael Lehmann that also
uses family photographs to explore the relationship of personal history
to public politics while at the same time continuing the longstanding
feminist project of telling the lost stories of women. Each of the project
members identifies as a granddaughter, positioning herself on the
motherline. Each of the project members was raised looking at these
photographs, along with historical photographs of Nazi atrocities taken
at the end of the war. The photographs, they write, are often ordinary:
holiday celebrations, vacations, family gatherings, portraits but their
larger historical context makes them extraordinary as well.22
Pascal Trudels hypertext Synchronicit also takes domestic themes of
the family album as a space of departure. The project is composed of
ten animations and soundtracks inspired by ten old black and white
photographs of my family, she writes, most of them taken between
1910 and 1940. Like the photographs we see in Third Generation,
Trudels photographs are ordinary, everyday fragments, captured in
albums across families: Two children and their mother / Two boys
and two cats / Two girls and a ball / The brass band / Venice / The
nurses / The wedding / The honeymoon / The young woman / The
labyrinth.23 It is their ordinariness, in fact, that Trudel sees as poetic and
magical photographs so specifically grounded in narratives of family
153
life that they take on a universal quality, revealing these snapshot

moments as being less about individual families than about the narratives that structure family life in specific times and places.
Trudels site reminded me of how I had once found a blank photo
album at Goodwill and all the pictures had been taken out but small
typed captions had been left beneath ghost outlines of the spaces once
occupied by photographs (where are they now?). I loved it precisely
because this could be anyones album: Uncle Harold standing in front
of the Louvre (and I can see him there), View of Eiffel Tower from the
street, Uncle Ernie and Aunt Phyllis, 40th anniversary, cutting the
cake together, and so on.
Longstanding feminist preoccupations with recovering lost stories
find a more explicit place in digital work, too. Deena Larsens Marble
Springs, for example, is an interactive poetry hypertext that explores the
lives of frontier women of the American West.24 Along the way, readers
encounter lexias about cooking and quilting and uncover, guided by
the complex linking structure, relationships among diverse women.
The reader is also presented with anonymous poems found in an
abandoned ghost-town church and is invited to excavate textual clues
as to the poets identities, in a manoeuvre suggesting the recuperation
and rediscovery of forgotten and anonymous women artists that was
also a focus of second-wave feminism.25
Feminist hypertexts also tell the stories of private domestic spaces
that so often go unnoticed. While some of this work makes use of personal photographs, as discussed, Olia Lialinas hypertext My Boyfriend
Came Back from the War, for example, tells a story of reunited lovers
through the montage of a series of haunting black and white images
that take different shapes and occupy different territories on screen.
Large images divide by two (and divide by two again and again) as the
reader follows Lialinas links, creating smaller, more intimate spaces
which, juxtaposed with the images of the explosive outside, eventually
become claustrophobic.26
Craft
From the root of the word hypertext itself texere, to weave there are
explicit and ubiquitous references to womens traditional needlecrafts
(weaving, sewing, stitching, patching) and the urgency to mimic and
resurrect them in hypertext works produced by women. This echoes
much earlier feminist preoccupations, of course for example, Faith
154 Caitlin Fisher
Wildings knitted womb room mentioned earlier, and the collage

work of Miriam Schapiro called femmage (female + collage). Influenced by the feminist movement of the early 1970s, Schapiro used textiles as symbolic of feminine labour.27
In her hypertext Fretwork: ReForming Me, Carolyn Guyer talks
about purchasing bits and pieces of a discarded mola (a Kuna quilt).
First she attempts to fix it and in so doing conjures the women who first
sewed the quilt, and soon she is adding to a palimpsest of stories. She
writes, I imagined these stories as I sewed. Then, I couldnt resist making a mola myself. When I did a small one, only about a quarter the size
of one of the Kuna pieces it was not particularly fine work, but the next
one was better, and the one after that better still. I stitched these beginners pieces into the quilt top, adding new stories to old.28 Shelley Jacksons Patchwork Girl or A Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley and Herself a
graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story, and broken accents begins with
the figure of the stitched female body, and the hypertext is composed
around the figure constructed carefully to accommodate the parts.
Theres a graveyard, with tombstone lexias, a crazy quilt, and a journal,
that ubiquitous womans art, makes an appearance too. Patchwork Girl
riffs on both Frankenstein and The Patchwork Girl of Oz as well as
womens traditional craftwork and works outward from a speculation:
what if the monster was a woman, and what if she fell in love with her
female maker?29
Like some of the other work discussed here, Jacksons text also
deploys another classic feminist strategy: retelling the stories we have
been told from a different vantage point. Literary intertexts in feminist
digital work abound, from Frankenstein (a feminist favourite), to the
overtly misogynist Malleus Maleficarum (The Hammer of Witches, the
bible of witchhunters) in Juliet Martins A Witchs Work Is Never Done,30
to Deena Larsens work Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts. Samplers
is richly suggestive of womens needlecrafts but also returns to oral
forms of telling and incorporates Navajo myths of creation, Hopi tales,
and Coyote.31
Essentialist arguments about technology, core imagery, consciousness-raising, lost stories, domestic themes and tools is it all just retroapocalypse? A digital doorway to the infinitely recyclable past?32 Nostalgia for an unchanging feminist home, now digitally canonized? The
future, as Disney and Spielberg have taught us, writes hypertext theorist Stuart Moulthrop, is a place we must come back to ... Tomorrow
will be a heyday of nostalgia, an intensive pursuit of lost or forgot-
155
ten values.33 If collecting can be understood as a consoling substitute

and, as one writer puts it, evidence of continuity and symbolic communication with the past, to what extent should these feminist hypertexts and digital archives be read as attempts on the part of some
women to shore up against the loss of this feeling of coming home
some women found in feminism? How many of these digital works,
then, function merely as nostalgic reconstructions of an imagined
(much better, less fragmented) feminist past? As a fluid screen between
the second wave and now, unmediated by lessons learned?
But is there only one way to tell this story from the naive 1970s to the
sophisticated here and now except online? Do all of the old criticisms
apply in exactly the same ways? What would happen, hypertext theorist Johndan Johnson-Eilola urges us to consider, if we were to allow
our nostalgia to channel new possibilities into old pathways?34 Rather
than dismiss these formulations as old, essentialist, or naive, I would
like to suggest that productive tensions and pathways might generate
new texts.
Much of the new digital material is generated by young women and
women new to feminism for whom these debates are being staged for
the first time, and who bring new experiences and, possibly, expectations of hybridity and diversity to the encounter. To the extent that this
is true, perhaps the feminist yesterday I see all around me has more to
do with my own reading practices. If so, not all of the old criticisms of
essentialism, of the homogeneity of CR groups, of the sisterhood, of
repetition and so forth, can apply in exactly the same ways. Could these
hypermedia practices disrupt understandings of the boundaries of
feminist theory and the stories we tell ourselves by dislodging our
assumptions about, for example, whats already been done and what is
no longer worth pursuing to produce jarring and inspiring new
insights? Rosi Braidotti offers that
the new is created by revisiting and burning up the old ... like the totemic
meal recommended by Freud, you have to assimilate the dead before you
can move on to a new order. The way out can be found by mimetic repetition and consumption of the old. We need rituals of burial and mourning
for the dead, including and especially the ritual of burial of the Woman
that was.35
Following Braidotti then, even if feminist hypertext practitioners are

not consciously engaged in the ritual of burial, the rehearsal of the old
156 Caitlin Fisher
may have surprising value, revealing tensions and pathways that prove
to be productive for feminisms. By revisiting 1970s feminist preoccupations in hypermedia a new kind of critical space may be opened up
with fresh answers as to where we might go from here.
This return to the body, arguably this reconstruction of Woman,
here in the digital realm, this return to familiar domestic scenes, can
also be read in the context of being produced by hypertext practitioners
who have no idea that they are engaged in repetition and whose entry
points are various. They are indebted to growing up with the legacy of
feminism in popular culture and a curiously ahistorical cyberfeminist
girl power that at least occasionally gives a nod to both Haraway and
Irigaray. The Web offers a different arena for politics with the possibility
for wide dissemination. Intriguingly, it might well be through this kind
of work, in the context of hypertext projects whose centre is always
shifting, that we will be challenged to arrive at, for example, a real
rethinking of the place of essentialism in feminist thought or the continuing need, across generations, to share individual stories in search of
pattern.
Alongside monstrous reading practices we may wish to bring to
these texts, some of the core imagery online is already pretty monstrous, no longer so easy to imagine as being possible thirty years ago.
Linda Dements inspired little cyberflesh girlmonsters are visually suggestive of the weaving together of cyborg and speculum:
linda dement (ld): I collected body parts from women, they donated
their body parts digitally, and I put those bits and pieces together to create
little monsters. From that I made a work that is really about monstrous
femininity, its like a black comedy, there are little monsters and digital
videos of various monsters behaviours and stories and medical information about the physiology of certain monsters.
miss m: What kind of monsters are they?
ld: Very fleshy, female, conglomerate. All of the monsters are made up of
womens body parts, different body parts. They are conglomerations.
miss m: To give people a picture who have not had the chance to see [the
work] what do you mean by body parts?
ld: Everything. Lots of people sat on the scanner. Weve got hands and
faces, not many though, because its hard to put your face on the scanner,
the lights are too bright. A lot of scars, bums, feet, hands, anything. And by
the time Ive made the monsters you cant really recognize particular
things anymore. They are just strange, fleshy shapes.36
157
This collage of parts to produce composite monsters, this homage to

Frankensteinian femininity, encourages the reader/viewer to think in
complicated ways about identities both individual and collective
and their relationships to bodies.
George Landow, writing about Shelley Jacksons own patchwork tale
about monsters, notes that in reading hypertexts we increasingly come
to realize an assemblage of points, one of the most insistent of which
appears in the way we use our information technologies, our prosthetic
memories, to conceive ourselves37 a palimpsest of theories and stories, then, in which the linking structure itself signals a departure from
uncomplicated telos. As Jackson herself writes in Patchwork Girl, we
are ourselves ghostly. Our whole life is a kind of haunting; the present
is thronged by the figures of the past. We haunt the concrete world as
registers of past events, we are revenants. And we are haunted, by these
ghosts of the living, these invisible strangers who are ourselves.38
These feminist hypertexts, arguably as much about feminisms past
as about its present, able to be read as both naive and fresh, dangerous
and productive, disrupt the easy linear developmental tale of the feminist then to the feminist now, and in so doing reveal new possibilities,
through their performance of feminist theories, wrapping and looping
on themselves, suggestive of new ways to think about who we think
we are and what we carry within us.
NOTES
1 Most of the hypertexts discussed in this paper were visited in 19992000.
2 Carolyn Guyer, Along the Estuary, Mother Millennia, coordinated by Carolyn Guyer (2000), http://mothermillennia.org/Carolyn/Estuary.html.
3 Judy Malloy, Hypernarrative in the Age of the Web (2003), http://
www.well.com/user/jmalloy/neapaper.html.
4 Vannevar Bush, As We May Think, Atlantic, July 1945, 1018.
5 Sadie Plant, The Future Looms: Weaving Women and Cybernetics, in Clicking In, ed. Lynn Hersham Leeson (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 134.
6 Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, Izme Pass, and Michael Joyce, WOE,
Writing on the Edge 2, no. 2 (spring 1991).
7 Shelley Jackson, My Body: A Wunderkammer, Alt-X Publishing Network
(1997), http://www.altx.com/thebody/.
8 VNS Matrix, Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century (1996),
http://sysx.org/vns/manifesto.html.
158 Caitlin Fisher

9 Kristine Blair and Pamela Takayoshi, Navigating the Image of Woman
Online, Kairos 2, no. 2 (1997), http://english.ttu.edu/kairos/2.2/
binder2.html?coverweb/invited/kb.html.
10 Faith Wilding, Notes on the Political Condition of Cyberfeminism, Art
Journal 57, no. 2 (summer 1998), http://www-art.cfa.cmu.edu/
www-wilding/notes.html.
11 http://www.goingfaster.com/angst/harleyculture.htm
12 Linda Hutcheon, Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern, University of Toronto English Library Criticism and Theory Resources (1997), http://
www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/criticism/hutchinp.html.
13 Susan Hawthorne, Introduction, in Cyberfeminism: Connectivity, Critique,
and Creativity, ed. Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein (North Melbourne,
Australia: Spinifex Press, 1999), 12.
14 Julie Ann Chiron, Awaken.org, http://www.awaken.org/.
15 Douglass H. Thomson, The Work of Art in the Age of Electronic (Re)Production, Romanticism on the Net 10 (May 1998), http://users.ox.ac.uk/
~scat0385/work.html.
16 Abbe Don, Bubbes Back Porch, http://www.bubbe.com/.
17 Mother Millennia, coordinated by Carolyn Guyer, http://mothermillennia.
org/.
18 World Lesbian Biography Site, http://www.echonyc.com/~lesbians/.
19 Dawn Stoppiello, Web forum posting, 10 August 1999, Gender & Identity
in New Media: Open Forum, http://www.judymalloy.net/identity/
open.html.
20 Judy Malloy, Its Name Was Penelope (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems,
1993).
21 See Jaishree Odin, The Edge of Difference: Negotiations between the
Hypertextual and the Postcolonial, Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (1997):
598630.
22 Rachel Schreiber, Andrea Slane, and Jael Lehmann, Third Generation: A Website Project on Family Photographs and the Rhetoric of Memories of Nazi Germany
and the Holocaust (1999), http://www.mica.edu/schreiber/thirdgeneration.html.
23 Pascal Trudel, Synchronicit, Maid in Cyberspace Encore! (Studio XX,
1998), http://www.studioxx.org/maid-encore/intros/trudel.html.
24 Deena Larsen, Marble Springs (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1993).
25 Molly Abel Travis, Cybernetic Aesthetics, Hypertext, and the Future of Literature, Mosaic 29, no. 4 (December 1996): 11529.
26 Olia Lialina, My Boyfriend Came Back from the War (1996), http://www.
teleportacia.org/war/war.html.
159
27 Missoula Art Museum, Miriam Schapiro: Works on Paper, A Thirty-Year

Retrospective, Resource Library Magazine, 9 November 1999, http://
www.tfaoi.com/newsm1/n1m552.htm.
28 Carolyn Guyer, Fretwork: ReForming Me, rev. ed., Mother Millennia, coordinated by Carolyn Guyer (1999), http://mothermillennia.org/Carolyn/
Fretwork1.html.
29 Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl, or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley and Herself (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995).
30 Juliet Martin, A Witchs Work Is Never Done, Maid In Cyberspace (Studio
XX, 1997), http://www.studioxx.org/maidincyberspace/index.html.
31 Deena Larsen, Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1998).
32 Hutcheon, Irony, Nostalgia, and the Postmodern.
33 Stuart Moulthrop, You Say You Want a Revolution? Hypertext and the
Laws of Media, Postmodern Culture 1, no. 3 (May 1991), http://jefferson.
village.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.591/moulthro.591.
34 Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing
(Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, 1997).
35 Rosi Braidotti, Cyberfeminism with a Difference (University of Utrecht,
1996), http://www.let.uu.nl/womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm.
36 Miss M., An Interview with Sadie Plant and Linda Dement (1997), http://
www.t0.or.at/sadie/intervw.htm.
37 George P. Landow, Stitching Together Narrative, Sexuality, Self: Shelley
Jacksons Patchwork Girl, Cyberarts and Cyberculture Research Initiative (2000),
http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/ht/pg/pgmain.html.
38 Shelley Jackson, Patchwork Girl, or a Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley and Herself (Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995), unpag.
8 The Sight of Sound: The Last Angel of History

ri naldo walcott
The basic labours of archaeological reconstruction and periodization aside,

working on the contemporary forms of black expressive culture involves struggling with one problem in particular. It is the puzzle of what analytic status
should be given to the variation within black communities and between black
cultures, which their musical habits reveal. The tensions produced by attempts
to compare or evaluate differing black cultural formations can be summed up
in the following question: How are we to think critically about artistic products
and aesthetic codes which, though they may be traceable back to one distinct
location, have been changed either by the passage of time or by their displacement, relocation, or dissemination through networks of communication and
cultural exchange?1
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic
Introduction: The Emergence of the Sight of Sound

Let me begin with an obvious observation. It is undeniable in the age of
music television that music can be seen. That is, music now has a sight
to it as well as a sound. The post-MTV era (or post-MuchMusic, to
Canadianize, and post-BET, to blacken it) has given sight to sound.
Music videos have changed how many of us respond to music and how
we make meanings of, and out of, music.2 This new relation to music,
a sonic sighting if you will, has inevitably changed the shape and sound
of music and how it is represented or seen both in our imaginations
and, for my purposes in this essay, in the filmic text. This new relation
of the sight of sound and a new history for the relationship between the
ear and the eye have profound effects for the future of musics and the
The Sight of Sound: The Last Angel of History
161
future of popular musics in particular. In short we must now confront

the optics or the visuality of sound.
It is the sight of sound in its black diasporic tones, rhythms, and gaze
that I want to explore in this essay in relationship to John Akomfrahs
The Last Angel of History (1995, 45 minutes). The film is a theoretical
excavation of the relationship between black popular musics, futurism,
science fiction, and the alien history of transatlantic slavery. It posits
quite explicitly a critique of the assumption that black people have been
more alienated from technological innovations than anyone else.
Instead it posits a relation to technological innovation and its discourses that sees black people as intricately tied to technological innovation. In short, the film offers a partial but important critique of some
narratives of modernity by demonstrating how black musics have fashioned a relation and a discourse of futurism that both borrows from and
sits in relation to yet simultaneously alongside other modernisms the
film works with music to accomplish this claim. The film gives sound
sight, producing the optics of music. For Akomfrah to achieve his intentions it must be understood and taken as serious that the first technology of the modern was the enslaved bodies of Africans made into
machines in the plantation economy. But because those bodies refused
such a limited designation, they immediately became cyborgs, as
Kodwo Eshun argues in the film.
In short, the film calls into being a cinematic sonic diaspora constituted through the Internet of black cultures. The metaphor of the
Internet is apt for the black diaspora. The World Wide Web, in its
dispersal and yet its apparent coherence, and simultaneously its
knowability and uncertainty, parallels the black diaspora. In recent
scholarship, black diasporic response to the continuing and increasing
presence of the World Wide Web in human life has been a feeling of disenfranchisement. This disenfranchisement is understood mainly as
access to technology, but in its most problematic forms it is produced as
a form of black anti-technological attitude that is somehow mysteriously embedded in the African cultural psyche. Scholarship pioneered
by Lisa Nakamura and Beth Kolko has been important for demonstrating how various colonial narratives of race and nation have come to
characterize how black people and other people of colour are represented on the Web. It has been important for demonstrating the worldliness of the Web. However while that scholarship plays a crucial role
in pointing to how various forms of sedimented whiteness organize
assumptions on and about the Web, such scholarship does not account
162 Rinaldo Walcott
for actual black peoples ongoing relations and engagements with

resignifying various technological forms. It is in part my argument, and
I think Akomfrahs, that when black people engage the technological
they make its appearance different from what it was intended. They
make the technological utter its form and its content otherwise. That is,
black people attempt to make the technological human and not otherwise, as Derrick May articulates in Last Angel of History. For example,
the remaking of the turntable into an instrument releasing the inert
energy within it, as Eshun points out in the film, is a case in point.
It is part of the goal of this essay to think about the ways in which
music has been continuously visual and optical for black diaspora peoples even before the advent of music television and the music video.
That is, music has played a fundamental role in the shifting and re-education of a racist gaze positioned on black bodies in an attempt to force
an understanding of black bodies as bodies which inhabit the qualities
of humanity. This provokes a confrontation with those discourses of
modernity which seek to render black people less than human. In short,
the visuality of the black body has played a role in claiming its humanity through sound/song and thus offering another narrative of modernity that is aurally visual.
First, let me suggest that by the sight of sound I am reworking what
Arthur Knight calls the sight of music in an essay on the use and abuse
of jazz in Hollywood films. Knight writes, the sight of music becomes
the object of industrial mechanisms and forms.3 He further states:
What music looks like relates crucially to how it sounds and what it
can mean. Whether viewed in performance, depicted on the cover of a
score or record, or suggested by program notes or words of a radio
announcer, the look of music influences how listeners categorize
what they hear. Is it art or commercial claptrap? Is it music or
noise? What is its relation to me, to us? The look of music helps define
and answer such questions.4
I am re-inflecting Knights phrase to move it beyond the genre of jazz
to account for a larger body of black diaspora musical sounds rap,
house, techno, funk, reggae, drum n bass, jungle, avant-garde jazz or
free jazz to name a range of black musical languages and noises. These
contemporary black noises are wholly imaginary sounds, as David
Toop understands them. These musics that are constructed mainly in
the studio represent black peoples deep engagements with technology.
But most importantly these engagements with technology resignify and
rearticulate it, making it speak an experience and a history that it was
163
often largely not intended to speak. Many of these engagements suggest new and different histories. These new or different histories require
that we rethink the place of black people in the modern and postmodern articulations of our times. I am interested in the sight of sound as it
recombines new and old musics to create new sound sculptures that
our ears have not borne witness to before.5 These musics provide a new
history of the ear. They share a discontinuous history with some previous black musics, most of all what is referred to as free jazz or avantgarde jazz, a sound and practice of noise which had to retrain the ears
sensibilities to make it intelligible to listeners. However, these new technologically driven musics occupy a place within black diaspora cultures through which the communicative aspects of transnational
community are maintained and transformed for local consumption, all
the while fitting contradictorily into the networks of global capitalist
relations for these musics are produced for consumption and are consumed. Additionally, these musics are as much related to the very specific personalities who make or create them as they are tied into a
complex network of nightclubs and other parties which provide a transnational network of demand and consumption. However, we should
also be cautious and note that not all consumption is the same. Consumption varies with regards to historical relations of production. Do
black people consume these musics differently from others? Are there
different ways in which black people in Toronto, London, and Detroit
consume these musics? And what about the overwhelmingly large consumption of these musics by white cosmopolitan youth and others?
One cannot be too glib about the complex terrain of consumption and
desire that these computer-driven sounds occupy in contemporary
musical taste cultures. What is crucial is that the music and its consumption must be placed in the discontinuous history of black Atlantic
music-making and its specific historical context.
In W.E.B. DuBoiss seminal text The Souls of Black Folk, music plays a
central role in his suggestion that African Americans have given the
United States any folk culture that it might have. In the chapter Of the
Sorrow Songs popularly known as the Negro spirituals DuBois
suggests that these songs/sounds represent the only authentic cultural
expression of the United States, forged in the crucible of the conditions
of early nation-state formation that of chattel slavery. DuBois writes:
Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God
himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this New World has
164 Rinaldo Walcott

expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by
fateful chance the Negro folk-song the rhythmic cry of the slave stands
to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful
expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been
neglected, it has been, and is half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still
remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift
of the Negro people.6
While DuBois is concerned to position the folk/volkgiest of the United

States as largely African American, he is attempting to suggest that the
music is American folk music because of the ways in which it evokes the
humanity of those who were enslaved. This in a manner not witnessed
to the same degree and with the same spirit in other American cultural
texts. The significance here is that the music articulates one of the fundamental tenets of modernity a desire for liberation and freedom.
But what is equally important about DuBoiss text is the way in
which he deploys the use of musical texts or bars of music. Each chapter of the book begins with a bar of music from one of the Sorrow Songs.
This music in retrospect signals what I would characterize as DuBoiss
attempt to bring sight to sound. In its simplest form, reading is a kind of
seeing, a form of optical relations to the word, the page, the text.
DuBoiss musical epigraphs force us to consider the sight of the Sorrow
Songs; as we range or read across the pages, we are forced to visualize
the music of black humanity and therefore to embody the music and in
some ways its message. This use of music forces readers to confront
music as more than tonal, verbal qualities; its language becomes more
wide-ranging and thus forces other kinds of questions. The music in
Souls stands as a kind of visual demand of black peoples demands for
freedom. DuBois thus inaugurates the sight of sound in Souls. This
sight of sound has its parallel in the Fisk Jubilee Singers travels to
Europe.7 The massive curiosity that greeted the Fisk Jubilee Singers as
they travelled in Europe to raise funds for their college also brought
sight to sound as well. Many were as interested in seeing these black
ambassadors of song as they were interested in hearing their stirring
songs. In the latter case, the gaze is posed through an exoticism of the
quaint African-American performers.
Black musical performers have had a long and sustained relationship
to the look of their sound. Think for example of Miles Daviss practice
of turning his back on his audience as he played his horn; such a prac-
165
tice was as much about the look of masculinity and a certain kind of
creative insubordination as it was about the performative qualities of
Miles Davis as entertainer. This look of sound as mapped onto the body
of the entertainer takes its ultimate spectacle in Michael Jacksons recreation of himself as a kind of multiracial, deracialized body.8 But the era
of music television has such a profound impact on the look of sound
that a film like The Last Angel must negotiate some difficult terrain in
terms of how to represent sound visually without creating a music
video. In numerous hip-hop videos technology and computer paraphernalia are everywhere seen, but what Akomfrah does is to refuse
the cybernetic as spectacle but to integrate it as one important component of sound. By so doing the film fashions a site of sound, which
engages with the cybernetic as source, and yet something more; that
something more is the cybernetic as cipher of transnational communicative practice a web of historical and contemporary conversations,
disagreements, pleasures, and disappointments.
The Workings of Diaspora
Kobena Mercer, in Diaspora Culture and Dialogic Imagination: The
Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain, writes of a critical
dialogism. For Mercer a critical dialogism allows for a reworking of
both nation and community as multiple. In this way, questions of race
and class are irrevocably linked with questions of gender and sexual
politics. This irrevocable mixing or creolizing of the conceptual terrain
of thinking the Human and therefore thinking community is Mercers
attempt to overturn the oppositional relations of hegemonic boundary
maintenance.9 Mercer continues to argue that critical dialogism questions the monologic exclusivity on which dominant versions of national
identity and belonging are based.10 A generous reading of diaspora
perambulations can be ceded within Mercers conceptualization of critical dialogism. This is so because diaspora concerns itself with both the
national, or more specifically the local, and its outer-national identifications. Critical dialogism allows for both antagonism and connection
within and across the black diaspora as well as within and across
national boundaries. What is at stake within diaspora workings when
we confront moments of critical dialogism is how to understand and
make community. In this way community is struggled over and not
assumed despite or in spite of some common historical moments. Mercer is interested in critical dialogism because he wants to author a the-
166 Rinaldo Walcott
ory of aesthetics that can move beyond the invocation of mythical and
singular origins.
Furthermore, Stuart Hall tells us that diaspora is about a point of
departure that does not necessarily only mean a place of origin or an
original homeland. For black peoples, the place of origin is often signalled as that Enlightenment invention of continental space/place
known as or called Africa. In an essay in which he looks at Caribbean
diaspora identities in England, Hall tells us that instead departure
might suggest axes or vectors ... the vectors of similarity and continuity; and the vectors of difference and rapture.11 These vectors signal the
more nuanced and complex facets of black diaspora identifications
instead of a return to origins as a site of certainty and knowability. Hall
is careful to chart history not as a linear progression but rather as meandering and much more Creole than we sometimes are willing to
acknowledge. We shall see shortly how these vectors of difference and
continuity, similarity and rupture, work in Akomfrahs film. Hall also
points out that diaspora identities are those which are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and
difference.12 Therefore diaspora identities are not locked into uncovering their relation to a lost past, but rather diaspora identities seek to
come to terms with a past interrupted and to make sense of the new
modalities through which life is lived, modalities which recognize both
pleasure and pain, desire and disappointment as the conditions of its
humanity. Hall cautions us and I follow him:
I use the term [diaspora] metaphorically, not literally: diaspora does not
refer us to those scattered tribes whose identity can only be secured in relation to some sacred homeland to which they must at all costs return, even
if it means pushing other people into the sea.
Hall further states: The diaspora experience as I intend it here is

defined, not by essence or purity, but by the recognition of a necessary
heterogeneity and diversity; by a conception of identity which lives
with and through, not despite, difference; by hybridity.13 Thus Halls
caution is against a search for origins into what might be needed in this
moment; instead a different kind of archaeology is needed. It is an
archaeology concerned with uncovering the ways in which our remaking can allow us to live with and through the complex communities we
inhabit.
This cinematic nearness is an indication of the relationship between
167
black cultures and what Hall calls Prsence Europenne. The central
importance of Kraftwerks The Man Machine to contemporary black
electronic musics is a case in point. This nearness cannot be too easily
overlooked, for it complicates the question of how we might call community into being and how we might understand the historical relations of what community we attempt to call into being in specific
political moments. The European presence in the Americas in relation
to blackness obviously conjures up the violence of colonialism, imperialism, and contemporary racisms. However, the relationship is also
somewhat more complex than the technologies of victimhood used to
subordinate black peoples. As Hall has pointed out concerning the
complexity of the situation:
In terms of popular cultural life, it is nowhere to be found in its pure, pristine state. It is always-already fused, syncretized, with other cultural elements. It is always-already creolized not lost beyond the Middle
Passage, but ever-present: from the harmonics in our musics to the
ground-bass of Africa, traversing and intersecting our lives at every point.
How can we stage this dialogue so that, finally, we can place it, without
terror or violence, rather than being forever placed by it? Can we ever recognize its irreversible influence, whilst resisting its imperializing eye? The
enigma is impossible, so far, to resolve. It requires the most complex of cultural strategies.14
In Halls conception of the ways in which Europe figures in New World

black creolization, a call is made for both an understanding of the terror
of the effects of transatlantic slavery and then something else. This cinematic creolizing moment is important because it signals a much more
complex archaeology of the nation and its history than we often
encounter. This cinematic move is in part a move to figure out how
New World blacks can make reparation with the violent birth of their
newness within the contexts of an emergent, vicious modernism stemming out of Europe but for which they are both its examples and its
detritus. In many ways The Last Angel takes us in another direction
towards answering this question.
The Last Angel of History: An Aesthetics of Cut n Mix
Given my comments above, I want to continue to suggest that the film
under discussion is about more than recording a history or histories of
168 Rinaldo Walcott
black music. That is, it is more than figuring origins; it is about black
music and something more. The something more is a nation of a community born into but more usefully a community built out of meaningful political dialogue. Even more specifically, I want to suggest that
music is given sight in the film so that the workings of diaspora in its
ephemera, sensibilities, consciousness, material and other conditions,
its disappointments, pleasures and pains, and its political identifications might be partially exposed might be seen. Last Angel, then, is a
double project or what Hall calls the double inscription.15 It seems to
document contemporary black musics and their relationship to technology, and it also seeks to mirror those musics in content and form in
its cinematic language.
Following Hall we can now come to terms with diaspora as being
more than a traumatic dispersal from an original homeland yes it is
that, but it is also much more. To reiterate Hall, diaspora is about
renewal. Last Angel gives sight to the process of renewal through the
cybernetic orderings and disorderings of contemporarily derived technological practices. The real vision of the film is not, I would suggest, in
its Afro-futurism but rather in its unsentimental gaze backwards. As
the Data Thief or narrator tells us, returning home is impossible. Highlighted in the film is the ambivalence of history, genealogy, and archaeology as fixed signals of time, community, and identity. Instead,
something else is being appealed to. It is the displacement, relocation,
and dissemination that Gilroy alerts us to that gives music sight in the
film.16 Last Angel maps a history of the trauma that ushered in contemporary black musicality. By musicality I mean something broader than
music as form and content; I mean an entire cultural apparatus and sensibility encapsulated in something called black sound/music. But also
Last Angel takes this musicality to reframe cinematic language, and this
is where the sight of sound becomes both evident and blackened.
The film itself draws upon black diaspora sonic aesthetics. In particular a cut n mix aesthetic structures the films narrative. That is, the
film refuses linearity in favour of a back and forth, a constant crossing,
a kind of collaging of image and sound text to frame the cut n mix of
black diaspora sensibilities and histories. As Dick Hebdige put it some
time ago: The roots dont stay in one place. They change shape. They
change colour. And they grow. There is no such thing as a pure point of
origin, least of all in something as slippery as music, but that doesnt
mean there isnt history.17 Akomfrah draws on the music and its
untraceable genealogy to produce a film that while aware of the place
169
or history of Africa in Halls sense of placing does not concern itself

with tracing the origins or source of contemporary black musics.
Instead Last Angel is concerned with the ways in which the use of technology, in particular computers, drum machines, synthesizers, and
sampling machines remake soundscapes in both imaginary and
socially realistic ways. The imaginary musics under discussion in the
film are musics that take history as both the ground of their movement
and the category that must be exceeded. In this way the musicians discussed in Last Angel offer a dynamic revisioning of black diaspora history in their musics that is pedagogical in terms of how to enact the
kinds of creolization or hybridity discussed earlier. These musicians
and musics are not lodged in a moment from which a concern with origins is all that they can tolerate. The film takes its tenor from this attitude as well. This is not a dismissal of history, but rather an attempt to
make history usable.
The Data Thief returns to Africa as source but only ambiguously and
ambivalently. For Africa can now only be but one place or spot on the
postindustrial production line of black imaginary musics. The music of
techno, house, drum n bass, free jazz and reggae, or dub featured in
Last Angel defies any search for origins. These are pleasurable mongrel
musics. Instead, the echo of Africa in these musics lies in their use of
the drum, or rather what we must now call drum effects in the technological era, since these effects are often produced through means far
removed from the drum as we know it. But nonetheless the Data Thief
is still engaged in an archaeological project. But it is a project that seeks
to uncover not the stability or certainty of origins, but rather the messiness of historical recombination, dislocations, and new locations. This
new emphasis is in part the attempt to make reparations with the
new humans or what Sylvia Wynter calls new forms of human life
produced in the moment of the post-1492 European voyages to the
Americas.
The Afro-futurism that Last Angel chronicles and fashions as its
theme and form its practice is one of the elements of diaspora sharing, invention, and renewal. Angela McRobbie writes of this new
music, specifically drum n bass:
It is possible to hear the full force of the improvised tradition of jazz, combined with reggae sounds and toaster voiceover of the Jamaican dancehall, with the hip-hop tradition of the rapper, now souped up by
technological means to produce a thunderous and uniquely black and
170 Rinaldo Walcott

British underground sound. But there is no crude ethnic absolutism
inscribed within this form, instead its openness and fluidity and serious,
indeed scholarly, concern with the music celebrates the movement
between black, white and Asian mixes which is such a hallmark of this
musical style.18
As Greg Tate tells us in the film, technological advances have allowed

for access to an almost complete archive of black music now available
to these DJs and MCs, who have emerged as the most creative musicians of the late twentieth century. Access to this archive, or, as Tate
puts it, this digitized race memory, has meant that the play with musical history and history more generally is much more open and malleable now than for previous generations. As Goldie confirms in the film,
riffs from particular songs can now be lifted and placed in sequence
with other sounds to produce sounds/musics that the ear has not heard
before. This use of technology refigures the black body in modernity
and postmodernity because, as DJ/musician Derrick May suggests, the
effort here is not to demonstrate the alienation of technological innovation but rather to humanize technology. The irony of Mays assertion is
obviously not lost on viewers who must continually confront a discourse and practice of modernity that strove to make black bodies less
than human to make them machines in early modernity.
In fact, the attention to the alien experience in the film, as pointed to
by Greg Tate and, most forcefully, by Ishmael Reed and science fiction
writers Samuel R. Delany and Octavia Butler, along with DJ Spooky
and Kodwo Eshun, pinpoints the alien experience of transatlantic slavery, which is one aspect of the genesis of these imaginary musics of
the future. The discussion of the drum as an instrument for covering
communicative distance and its illegality in plantation slavery serves to
bring historical weight to bare on the renewal and inventiveness of
black diaspora musical practices. But these musics can also be read
back through a genealogy of black musics, which centre some concern
on the discourse of hope. As DuBois pointed out in his essay on the Sorrow Songs: Through all the sorrow of the Sorrow Songs there breathes
a hope a faith in the ultimate justice of things ... that sometime, somewhere, men will judge men by their souls and not by their skins.19 It is
exactly the question of justice that Reed tries to articulate when he
declares the experience of African Americans in the United States as an
alien experience, as far out. Reed is speaking to the contradictions of
modernity and its inability to ever allow full access to the subaltern.
These new musics are exemplary of what Paul Gilroy calls a counter-
171
culture of modernity. These musics occupy an ambivalent place in capitalist relations of production not only as exchange value but also
importantly as use-value. It is the use-value of these musics that Last
Angel engages in an archaeological dig into the crossroads for viewers
to see. The crossroads in West African cosmology are places of danger
and possibility where communication can occur, and this notion has
travelled to the New World.20
The trope and language of travel, migration, and movement is central to Last Angel. The language of movement is important to diaspora
aesthetics, forged as they are within the contexts of dislocations and
displacements. The films thematic focus on three musicians who call
on the trope of movement to give sight to their sound Sun Ra and his
Arkestra, Lee Scratch Perry and his Black Ark, and George Clinton and
Parliament and their Mothership Connection brings into the discourse of black diaspora aesthetics and narratives the futurology of the
past. By this I mean that the Exodus narrative is a central aspect of the
narrative myth-making of the black diaspora. This myth understands
black people as being displaced, sometimes roaming in a place they do
not belong to and requiring a necessary return to their original homeland. The iconography of space and alien beings used by these musicians when they visualize their music is as much about futurology and
its potential for liberation from an alienating real world as it is about
the historic alien experiences of black life in the Americas. But the
important thing about renewal in the context of the postmodern world
is not a return to the invented space of Africa, but rather an Africa that
lives through digital and cybernetic relations. A downloadable Africa.
This downloaded Africa is, however, not devoid of its presence and its
present that is, its current and past historical contexts. In the film
Africa is also a specific place with a specific history, and the invocation
of Ghana, in particular, raises many questions concerning issues of
place and displacement as well as citing the filmmakers birthplace.
This citation of birthplace is one way in which the advanced technologies of the music under discussion and the relationship of filmmaking
to Africa as a geopolitical entity are made evident. However, specific
musical trends now cross each other in ways that allow for far more
multiplication than we can sometimes immediately acknowledge.21
The Sight of Sound and a Sonic Diaspora Community
Part of what I am suggesting is that struggles around the making of
community are a central aspect of our thinking about what diaspora
172 Rinaldo Walcott
might mean. Issues of community and diaspora raise such questions as:
What kinds of transnational or outer-national political identifications
are worthwhile and useful? What new codes of belonging will be developed that would allow for a much more far-reaching notion of what
constitutes the human? At stake is what Derrick May calls a species
jump in his attempt to argue for a humanizing of technology. This species jump should complicate the categories through which we live out
our social and cultural identities. Last Angel gives two interesting examples of the struggle to make sonic diaspora or digitized community and
their potential pitfalls.
The question of origins lies at the heart of both. For example, the
astronaut Bernard Harris tells us in the film that on an intended tour to
Africa he would be displaying a flag that is a combination of all the
flags of the nations of Africa, since, as a son of Africa he had made it
into space as their representative. Harriss desire to place Africa in a
central position vis--vis his space experience is part and parcel of the
relation between those in the diaspora and the imagined lost homeland.
But the collage flag that he is forced to carry actually highlights the
problem of origins, for his flag cannot pinpoint any one or specific
African place but must instead forge a unity that can only be an
ambivalent and ambiguous site of desire and representation. Harriss
desire to return to origins is already complicated by his having to stake
a claim to an invented Africa. It is, however, an Africa he needs. It is
also an attempt to make community through a particular and specific
appeal to history a history of origins and, in his case, affiliation. Last
Angel returns to Africa as source, imaginary desire, and, importantly, as
a code for understanding modernity as we know it and live it, in all its
viciousness and possibilities.
Similar tensions exist between musicians/DJs Derrick May and A
Guy Called Gerald. Mays and Geralds disagreement centres on the
use of the term jungle. What is interesting about this disagreement is
that it highlights the antagonisms of divergent yet related histories.
May brings to the conversation a U.S. rejection of the term jungle and
therefore cannot understand why black London calls their music Jungle. Gerald, who credits his desire to make music to having heard
Mays music on the radio, has a different history of the term jungle. As
he tells it in the film, Jungle as a name comes out of an area or neighbourhood in Jamaica referred to as the Jungle. Thus black Londons
music takes its name from the back and forth movement between
Jamaica and London. What is highlighted in this debate are the differ-
173
ent ways in which knowledge, connectedness, and disconnectedness

circulate across the black diaspora or more specifically the Black Atlantic. The film brings sight to this transatlantic debate, each speaker
framed within a split screen that clearly features their presence on computer screens a cinematic double inscription. In this sense viewers are
faced with a different relation of black bodies and black debates to and
within the technological and, more specifically, the cybernetic age.
Historically, there is a more immediate relationship between black
Britons and Jamaicans than between African Americans and Jamaicans.
It can be convincingly argued that black Londons cultural forms rely as
much on European and African genealogies as they do on Caribbean
and more specifically Jamaican cultural forms. The percentage of
Jamaicans who moved to England in the postSecond World War
migrations had a much larger impact on black British culture than similar migrations to the United States. This demographic difference has
much to do with the different naming and the different levels of comfort with the naming. In short, May is concerned to read the name Jungle through the racism of his locality since one of the central recurring
myths of racism in the United States is that black people hail from the
jungle, thus marking them as primitive and uncivilized. While such a
discourse can and probably is a part of the reason why a neighbourhood is called the Jungle in Jamaica, it is not necessarily the only reason.
Thus what we encounter in the debate is the limit of transnational political identification. Even within the black diaspora the struggle to make
community cannot be assumed as a foundational basis that is immediately explanatory to all who inhabit the space and conditions of
diaspora. Instead, other moments of ones making must also be taken
into account. Gerald seeks to account for another moment and must
therefore disagree with May. The immediately felt presence of Jamaica
or Jamaican-ness among black Londoners frames this diasporic disagreement.
What is ultimately at stake are the points or the cracking of the code
upon which community might be made in the above case the different
codes of history. This means that diaspora discourses do not call into
being an immediate and identifiable community founded in the original dispersal and then stop there. The intervention of history means
that other kinds of political positions, identities, and political commitments and affiliations are also at stake. Thus to invoke a black diaspora
is not to invoke a foundational, transnational community that is immediately knowable. In fact, part of the reason why the Data Thief cannot
174 Rinaldo Walcott
return home is that home too is dispersed and is no longer a clear-cut

prospect. Therefore a new politics is required for the making of community. It is the kinds of politics that will be the foundations of this community making that are crucial to the workings of diaspora only a
species jump can produce a new kind of community and politics.
Conclusion: Afro-Futurism or the Future of the Past
As I suggested earlier, black musics have always been characterized by
a certain kind of visuality. For example, is it possible to think of Cab
Calloways music without seeing him in his tails; to think of Sammy
Davis Jr, the Jackson Five, Michael Jackson, the artist now again known
as Prince, Bob Marley, or any number of black musicians without also
thinking of their image simultaneously? Rappers have taken the visuality of music to a new height, helping to usher in a visual diaspora
where fashion codes designate ones relation to hip-hop culture as a
sign of passionate attachment to the music. In short, black music has
always played an optical illusion on its listeners so that other kinds of
messages or conversations might be had when one encounters the
music. The film I have been discussing is representative of the elements
or the conditions of a visually sonic diaspora and the history of remembering that unfolds within the expressive cultures that give life to the
diaspora.
The Last Angel of History is concerned with how we remember. The
site of memory, as Toni Morrison put it, is a place where the traumas of
history can be differently mediated and where we can take some control over how history shapes us. In the realm of black diaspora art-making, memory and how we remember mediate against attempts to
render blackness either subordinate in terms of all of human history or,
in its most extreme case, non-existent. However re-memory is a politically active site where history and the terms of remembering are crucial to rethinking the self. This politicization of memory highlights the
fact that knowledge is not innocent. In the case of black diaspora
musics in the cybernetic age, digitized race memory allows for a musical memory which can mediate between musics of the past and musics
of the present-future in ways that continually return to important
moments of cultural sharing, renewal, and other unknown possibilities.
The Last Angel of History highlights how this works. The film highlights
the optical illusions of social reality through the ways in which memory
works to imaginatively represent the social, cultural realities of life in
175
late capitalist culture. In this way the sight of sound the film offers us is
an archaeology of our present-future. This different archaeology allows
us to assess the ethics of race, nation, community, and diaspora belonging. The film offers up an ethics of what, in the words of desire in Frantz
Fanons Black Skin White Mask, a new humanism or, to cite Derrick
May again, a species jump may look like.
NOTES
1 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 80.
2 See Andrew Goodwin, Dancing in the Distraction Factory: Music Television
and Popular Culture (London: Routledge, 1992); Simon Frith, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds, The Music Video Reader (London: Routledge, 1993).
3 Arthur Knight, Jammin the Blues, or the Sight of Jazz, in Representing Jazz,
ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 13.
4 Ibid.
5 Quincy Troupe, Avalanche (Minneapolis: Coffee House Books, 1996).
6 W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Signet Classics, 1982),
265.
7 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 80.
8 See Michael Akward, Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of
Positionality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
9 Kobena Mercer, Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination: The Aesthetics of Black Independent Film in Britain, in Blackframes: Critical Perspectives on Black Independent Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham and Claire AndradeWatkins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 59.
10 Ibid.
11 Stuart Hall, Cultural Identity and Diaspora, in Diaspora and Visual Culture:
Representing Africans and Jews, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London: Routledge,
2000), 24.
12 Ibid., 31.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid., 30.
15 Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies, in Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London:
Routledge, 1996).
16 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 80.
176 Rinaldo Walcott

17 Dick Hebdige, Cut N Mix: Culture, Identity, and Caribbean Music (London:
Comedia, 1987), 10.
18 Angela McRobbie, In the Fashion Society: Art, Fashion, and Popular Music
(London: Routledge, 1999), 16.
19 DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, 274.
20 Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of The Spirit: African and Afro-American Art
and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).
21 See George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism, and
the Poetics of Place (London: Verso, 1994).
9 History and Histrionics: Vision Machines

Digital Poetics
m i ch a e l u w e me d i m o a nd j o s h ua o p p e n he i me r ,
for vi sion mac hi ne
Forgetting to Remember
One thing still upsetting me, however, is that no one kept proper records of
meetings or decisions. This led to my failure to recollect whether I approved an
arms shipment before or after the fact. I did approve it; I just cant say specifically when.
Ronald Reagan, Iran-Contra scandal admission1
I have found it so difficult to believe what people told me of what happened
under the Khmer Rouge regime, but today I am very clear that there was genocide ... It was so unjust for those people. My mind is still confused.
Khieu Samphan, former Khmer Rouge leader2
The plaintiff complains that he has been fooled about the existence of gas chambers, fooled that is, about the so-called Final Solution. His argument is: in order
for a place to be identified as a gas chamber, the only eyewitness I will accept
would be a victim of this gas chamber; now ... there is no victim that is not dead
... There is, therefore, no gas chamber.
Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend3
The Indonesian army did not kill anybody ... Ive never heard of the civilian
death squads.
Kemal Idris, Indonesian Army General
who oversaw the extermination of the PKI4
Towards the end of his life, Ronald Reagan could remember nothing.
The holes in his memory into which slipped illegal arms shipments,
178 Michael Uwemedimo and Joshua Oppenheimer
and much else besides, had opened alarmingly. His memory was all
hole from which no fact, figure, or image could escape. It was not so
much that he had forgotten, it was that he could not remember.
The mind of Khieu Samphan by his own account is still confused.
Like Reagan before, his memory became all black hole. He recognizes
that something happened, but he just cannot say specifically what happened; he too has trouble remembering.
Both these examples of troubled recollection were staged within the
purview of a judicial and forensic apparatus that affirmed the reality of
a historical event whose details called for determination. Plainly put, in
both these cases there had been at least an admission that something had
happened something criminal, something terrible, something whose
details needed to be remembered. Much harder is a process of remembrance where no such apparatus exists, where no event is admitted to
have passed.
This chapter sketches out a practice whose aim is to seek a media
form that might adequately address a history that refuses to recollect its
systematic violence within a judicial, ethical, or forensic frame a
history that nonetheless conjures and casts the spectral threat of that
violence. We propose a practice that is at once intervention and investigation into history as terror, specifically the history of the 19656 Indonesian massacres. This essay reflects upon the implication of the digital
in this practices methods and processes, suggesting ways in which a
hitherto untheorized digital poetics may inform the notion of history
on which the practice is predicated and the mode of historiography
through which it proceeds.
Martyrs and Memory
On the night of 30 September 1965, six of Indonesias top army generals
were abducted and murdered in an abortive coup attempt. Who was
ultimately behind this operation, as well as their final objectives,
remain unclear.5 In a response that appears to have been remarkably
well rehearsed, General Suharto seized control of the armed forces and
instigated a series of nationwide purges to consolidate his power.
The CIA provided radio equipment and arms, MI6 provided black
propaganda (propaganda whose imputed source is the enemy), the
U.S. military provided training and cash, the U.S. State Department
provided death lists, and the Agency for International Development
provided support for youth groups that were groomed to become
Vision Machines Digital Poetics
179
death squads.6 With this assistance, General Suharto engineered and

set in motion a killing machine whose chain of command reached into
every region and every village, murdering alleged communists, trade
unionists, organized peasants, members of the womens movement,
and anybody else the army considered a threat. The campaign was
deliberately organized so as to implicate the masses: much of the killing, though under the supervision of the army, was actually carried out
by paramilitary branches of political groups in competition with the
Communist Party of Indonesia (Partai Komunis Indonesia, or PKI) and
affiliated groups. As pro-Suharto U.S. diplomat Paul F. Gardner
observes, [Surharto] did not wish to involve the army directly ... he
preferred instead [quoting Surharto], to assist the people to protect
themselves and to cleanse their individual areas of this evil seed.7
The massacres that swept the archipelago in the months after
October 1965 were one of the most savage and systematic genocides of
the twentieth century. Western governments, covertly and deeply
involved, made no official protest and little public mention of the
slaughter, save the odd encouraging message of support.8 The Western
press was equally mute. Since then, the events have been all but erased
from official histories; no national or international juridical process has
been launched. No trials, no memorials, no days of public mourning for
the victims of the massacres. While martyrs were made of the seven
murdered generals, their memorialization served at once to justify and
mask the memory of the massacres. Tales of ritualistic savagery
inflicted on the murdered generals were circulated widely. These tales
of savagery served to conjure an overwhelming and spectral threat
facing the nation the evil seed as Suharto called it. In the face of
this threat, the massacres were not murders; they were at once justice,
self-defence, and victory. In any case, the Indonesian army did not kill
anybody.9
A History of Holes: The Crocodile Hole
Lubang Buaya (Crocodile Hole) was the name for the area, within the
Halim Perdanakusumah Air Force Base perimeter [Jakarta], where the
bodies of the assassinated generals were disposed of (dumped down a disused well). In 196566 a successful psychological warfare campaign was
launched by the army to persuade anti-communist notables and political
leaders that the PKI had secretly prepared thousands of comparable
holes for their burial after execution.10
This psychological warfare campaign was part of a systematic extermination program in which anywhere between 100,000 and 2,000,000 people were murdered.11 These figures are impossible: on the one hand,
they are radically deflated and kept from circulation so as to shield the
operation from the condemnation of the international community of
conscience. On the other hand, higher figures, even inflated figures,
are deliberately allowed to circulate threateningly.12 Such divergent
estimates render attempts to count the dead, to recount their history,
and to hold to account the murderers fraught with terrible uncertainty.
That is to say, the trail of noughts in these tallies are more precisely
ciphers in that they mark both mass graves and empty graves graves
waiting to be filled. They are threatening placeholders, as were the
rumoured crocodile holes that supposedly awaited the anti-communist notables and political leaders.
A history of the massacres would be a string of such holes, and the
ciphers in the tallies of the dead form an abysmal archipelago, a network of absences and silences haunted by whispers and by a sometimes spectral, sometimes spectacular, violence. This history itself does
not seek merely to deny or hide its violence but to allow it to circulate as
a haunting force that suddenly, from time to time, flares up in an awesome display of violence.13
Snake River
At the National Security Archive in Washington, DC, an anonymous
and untitled folio of notes records some of what little is publicly known
of the 19656 Indonesian genocide. A Sumatran massacre of 10,500 people is recorded in a typical entry as follows:
CARD NO: 20 143
DATE: NO DATE
INDIVIDUAL: N. Sumatra
ITEM: From North Sumatra came a report of the slaying of 10,500 prisoners, who had been arrested for PKI activities. Their bodies were thrown
into the Sungai Ular.
The Sungai Ular, or Snake River, is distinguished only by its size and
relatively swift flow. It was for this reason that it was chosen as an execution site unlike slower, smaller rivers, the Snake River could be
relied upon to carry the dead out to sea.14 Before the river meets the sea,
181
it passes under the trans-Sumatran highway at Perbaungan, about

thirty miles southeast of Medan, North Sumatras capital city. Within
sight of a bridge where the highway spans the river is one of the clearings in the plantation where the Snake River was loaded with its
nightly freight of bodies.
Since 2001, Vision Machine, a collective of filmmakers, theorists, and
activists, has been working collaboratively in this region with a community of Indonesian expolitical prisoners, former bonded plantation
workers, and union activists all based in North Sumatra. In various
infiltrative modes, they are working with political, military, and paramilitary groups in the same region. The work of the collective consists
of research into and performance of this impossible history.
History and Histrionics: An Archaeological Performance
To excavate the history of the massacres, Vision Machine has developed
a research and production method that is perhaps best thought of as an
archaeological performance. Between a buried historical event, and its
restaging with historical actors, this method opens a process of simultaneous historical excavation (working down through strata) and histrionic
reconstruction (adding layers of stylized performance and recounting).
An archaeological performance entails successively working with,
and working through, the gestures, routines, and rituals that were the
motor of the massacres. The successive performances aim both to tap
an embodied memory of singular gestures and to reveal the bodys singular movements as moments of the minutely geared motions of a killing machine that mobilized well-rehearsed ideological roles.15 The
method seeks to reveal what was at once singular, and scripted, and to
do so by going through the motions of historical events to develop a
densely layered artifact. Here each layer is at once rehearsal and performance, re-enactment and response. This method, which typically
moves from interview via narration and re-narration through increasingly elaborate restagings, relies in large part on digital media as the
relay channel between different participants, or the same participants
at different stages of the process. Let us turn to one series of reconstructions and encounters.
There is a chilling scene in The Globalisation Tapes (2003), a video that
Vision Machine co-produced in Indonesia, in which a small girl, Intan
Sinaga, looks on, bored, at her grandfather, Sharman Sinaga. A former
Komando Aksi executioner and hired thug of the plantation manage-
ment, Sharman Sinaga stands up during an interview to demonstrate

for the camera how he killed a plantation worker considered kebal or
invincible he couldnt be killed with knives.16 He held him upside
down in a flooded field. He mimics the gargles his victim made as he
choked in the mud.
This brutal and direct account is the first layer in the archaeological
performance. It is for the most part a conventional interview. However,
even here, Sharman is encouraged not merely to tell but to show. The
interview moves already beyond recounting towards re-enactment. It
seeks out what might be lodged in embodied memory and asks questions of the position of the body in the motions of history. The interview is not relegated to a merely informational source, nor are its
words privileged as a source of truth or of untruth from which truth is
somehow extracted. Rather, it is one layer in a densely layered series of
performances.
As a result of the interviews disclosures, Vision Machine invited
Sharman Sinaga to reconstruct his nightly routine on the banks of the
Snake River, where he dispatched perhaps many hundreds of people.
The words and gestures of his interview continue to haunt this scene.
This re-enactment is the second histrionic layer, a layer constituted by a
field of action that directly overlays the site of the historical event. His
demonstration veers between chilling pantomime and forensic reconstruction. On the one hand, he details most precisely the modes and
methods of decapitation, illustrates angles of approach and attack,
explains the organizational and operational structure of the killing
machine. On the other hand, as he plays to the camera, staging himself
for an imagined movie audience, the rehearsal of recursive motions
breaks into a performance of disturbing improvisational flourish. He
elaborates kung-fu movie-style sequences, displays his own ferocious
machismo at the same time as he speaks the script of the purity of the
heroic national struggle against atheist communism. His projected
self-image is clearly inflected by the imagery of genre (he imagines
himself a kung-fu movie star). Equally apparent is that this self-image
is projected and refracted through a symbolic universe of ideological
tropes, those of the heroic and pure national struggle. Yet there are
gestures that appear to break out by reflex, that appear to motion from
a still-vivid and singular scene. There is a tension here between remembrance (an attempt to recall an event in its singularity) and performance
(the acting out of a role and speaking of a script that is generic). His performance, then, begs questions not just of what happened at Snake
183
River, but also of the relationship between trauma, memory, history,

and the politics of genre. This method begins to suggest the ways in
which what happened was itself already staged and scripted, the ways
in which the massacre mobilized well-rehearsed ideological roles and
relations, and the ways in which genre inflects the memories and imaginaries of those who were its historical actors.
Sharmans performance constitutes a layer whose contours are
defined at once from underneath, as it were, by the now-buried events
that passed at this site, as well as by downward pressures from the sedimented layers of historical revision that have buried them there. His
words and re-enactment stretch a spectral screen between these strata.
So staged, Sharmans performance becomes a kind of ghosting, or
shadow play it both accentuates the terrible absence of the victims
and conjures their spectres. Soon after this shoot, footage of Sharman
Sinaga demonstrating what happened at the Snake River is screened
back to Sharman for him to narrate. This re-narration is the third stage
of the process. The footage is transformed from a chronicle of events at
the riverside clearing into a reflexive document of how Sinaga sees himself and how he would like to be seen by others. It becomes his own
reflection on his own representation of himself as hero to the audience.
From this staging emerges a complex artifact that gestures not only to
the past but to the operations that continue to bury the past. This process of layered performance and response simultaneously reiterates the
irrecoverability of the historical real and resists its erasure. This material is then taken to survivors of the massacre and families of their victims. The content is described to them, and they are invited to review it.
During the screenings of this material they are asked to voice their
responses. The material is then re-screened, and another layer of
response and re-narration is added. Each screening and each response
is a mnemonic trigger, spawning further narrations and re-narrations,
stories and stories about the stories, memories and memories of the
process of remembrance, constructing in real time a crystalline constellation of voices that speak of the relationships between history and
trauma, recounting and remembering.
As they watch and speak, they not only recount their own experiences but also imagine and attempt to determine the motives and processes of the killers. This cinematically mediated exchange between
perpetrators and survivors opens a historical process that is not merely
recuperative but transformative. The encounter with the screen is a
moment of remembrance. It is also an encounter through which the sur-
vivors imaginatively infiltrate the history from which they have been
excluded. The process offers a medium through which they can
respond to events that they are unable to forget but have been forbidden to remember.
Recording their responses to the contemporary performance of a history of terror, a history that is itself an instrument of terror, allows them
to speak and to speak into their own history. It is a form of memorialization, mourning, and a moment of healing. Perhaps it is a first step
towards justice in a context where no effective judicial framework has
been established or is likely to be established soon.
Yet another histrionic layer is added as this footage re-enactment
overlaid by re-narration and response is used as source material for a
performance by the local Ludruk troupe, a Javanese improvisational
popular village theatre. Ludruk incorporates dance drawn from the
Javanese martial art pencak silat and borrows promiscuously from a host
of sources, high and low. Decidedly carnivalesque, its subversive
mocking of established orders has at times been met with severe official
response. Durasim, widely considered one of the forms greatest talents, was tortured to death by the Japanese military administration in
the early forties.17
The scenes, based on the layered film material, are performed in the
village, to an audience that includes Sharman Sinaga and those he once
terrorized on the London-Sumatra plantation. This show and its reception are also filmed, performance and response together becoming
another stage, another layer. Whereas the staging of Sinagas performance invites a consideration of the connections between history,
memory, trauma, and the politics of genre through a performative
investigation of the ways in which the televisual and cinematic imaginary has shaped historical imagination, this staging suggests the subversive and therapeutic possibilities offered by popular genre forms in
the recovery, recounting, and working through of traumatic memories
and histories that are otherwise repressed or suppressed. Again, the
possibilities of going through the motions are moments not only of
historical recovery but of imaginative transformation. If Sharman
Sinaga demonstrates one mode of revisionism, then the Ludruk appropriation of his performance instances another form of historical
revisioning. These experiments with genre are one passage, one path
towards transformation, towards becoming other. Here lies the redemptive potential of the method. The aim is to both reveal and resist
what the method makes manifest, to imagine oneself as other in the act
185
of remembering, to make ones history ones own at the moment of

transforming the self.
This process of becoming other was dramatically illustrated by the
sudden possession of one of the Ludruk players by the spirit of William
Colby, one-time director of the CIA and architect of the Phoenix civilian
extermination program in Vietnam. Here, a spectral figure who haunts
the history of the region is suddenly given body and voice; a figure who
lurked in the wings literally steps onto the stage. This is not a case of a
performance making explicit a shadowy aspect of this history (here the
CIAs involvement); the significance of Colbys convulsive cameo
resists rsum. Indeed, the aim of the project is not to restage the performance of terror in the journalistic genre of expos (which would attempt
to render a coherent summary of a violence that defies summary).
Rather this project intervenes in an official history of post-1966 Indonesia that has been consistently staged so as to terrorize precisely through
what it renders obscene, unmentionable within the terms of the official
discourse. The systematic and deliberate nature of the massacres is
excluded from the official script; it waits in the wings, threateningly
spectral. Wherever the official history is rehearsed, the script is deliberately and necessarily incoherent, unconcerned with adequacy to actual
events. It is not a history in the realist register; it does not speak in order
to refer; rather, it is rehearsed in order to exercise a power. It is a history
in the performative register.
This projects intervention is to restage this history differently from
its ceaseless rehearsals in schools, on national television, on days of official memorial to restage it in such a way that the operations of its
obscenity can be grasped, so that the spectres it produces can enter the
scene and be addressed, acknowledged, and contested.
Digital Palimpsest: Supplementary Layering
Digital technology is key to the process of political and historical reimagining and to a method of archaeological performance. This can be
neatly illustrated by an emblematic experiment with the re-narration of
an archival film of William Colby. Images of the former CIA director
giving a speech on the progress of the pacification of South Vietnam are
taken from the National Archive in Washington, DC. The sound
remains classified, and so Vision Machine employs a deaf man a lip
reader to read Colbys lips. It is not easy because the footage is blurry
and the lip reader requires eight passes to produce even a fragmentary
picture of what Colby is saying. With each pass, the lip reader picks out
more and more phrases like from time to time, isolating the population, and sportsmanship. The words from each pass are layered over
the others, each at the same relative point of utterance. This results in a
thick and strangely contoured voice track some moments become
dense with the same words or phrases, a crowd of echoes seemingly to
issue from Colbys mouth. At other moments, different words are read
from the same mouthing, the syllables of each interfering with those of
the others to produce a perverse double- (or triple-) speak. Some words
are picked up on one pass and not another. William Colby is saying different things at the same time; but, of course, he is saying nothing. The
silence beneath the re-narration is telling. It speaks at once of the uncertainty of historical knowledge and of the deliberate attempt to erase it.
In place of an account of the murders, and in place of the voices of the
murdered, we have footage of a small, spectacled man in a suit mouthing banalities in silence. Whereas in the Ludruk performance the spirit
of Colby possessed the performer, here we possess Colby. We speak as
Colby; we give him a voice. As he mimes, he is mimicked, both mocked
and mined for what he withholds. Some historical knowledge is
yielded, and something more is made known of the regional policy that
he was instrumental in shaping and administering. More tellingly, the
banal administration of tremendous power and violence is made to
speak through his silence, and the official history that he authored is
given another voice that speaks out against it. It becomes the material
of a historical imagination it would want to destroy.
This process is a form of archaeological performance. The historical
fragments that are recovered are artifacts of the present. The speech of
the past reaches us only as a contemporary performance.18 Each stage
of the interpretation exerts pressure on the preceding and subsequent
stage yet remains, in itself, distinct. With analogue technology, this process would be all but impossible. Unless one had dozens of small,
portable tape recorders for recording and playing back successive narrations, the best one could do is replace one of two soundtracks on a
videotape or else use a mixer to blend the narrations which could not be
unmixed. Thus, digital technology makes possible a method wherein
each new layer is an addition or a supplement, rather than something
that erases earlier versions. In a project on historical remembrance and
excavation in situ, this is essential.19 A digital palimpsest is fashioned
where overwriting does not entail writing out. Each layer interacts with
187
and refracts the others, yet its singular features remain intact. Layering,
of course, is built into the architecture of the editing software.
Digitally layered artifacts pervade contemporary media space. The
process can be heard in any pop song where voices are filled out, in
multi-screen news initiated by CNN, or in the voice-over commentary
on DVDs. For Vision Machine the tools of digital post-production offer
an ideal figure and metaphor. The material infrastructure informs our
conceptual framework and a working methodology of successive reenactment, circling the same gesture, the same scene, the same event,
asking participants to repeat and rehearse, and then relaying these
rehearsals to different participants, projecting them onto each other and
into different generic contexts. Importantly, this process of digital layering allows the figuring of a particular construction of spectrality, of
ghosts informing the quotidian field in which the digital project
unfolds. After all, the history that the project addresses is quite literally
haunted. That is to say, it produces and is populated by ghosts.
The production process must include both the community of spirits
and the fraternity of metaphors. Indeed the video itself has conjured
spectres, precipitated possessions. The domain of ghosts is parallel to,
and distinct from, the world of the living. Yet it occupies the same space.
This spectral realm is not so much contiguous with the corporeal world
as it is co-extensive with it.
Contrast the digital process of layering with the analogue process of
montage. Let us take for example Marcel Ophlss film The Sorrow and
the Pity (1972), which is essentially a montage of testimonies. Memory,
and the resistance to remembering, speak through testimony. It is montage, however, that re-members, puts together fragments of testimony,
articulates memory into historical chapters. This conception of remembering history is predicated on the possibility of recovering and
articulating a coherent and original historical event and truth. This
articulation proceeds by way of a subtle cross-examination whereby
one account is held up to the next, inconsistencies exposed, denials
made to betray themselves, confessions teased out. If in The Sorrow and
the Pity each account that abuts the next in some sense betrays the other
as untrue, the elements are nonetheless the lies from which emerges
the truth a truth against which the lies can be judged even if it can be
arrived at only via these lies.20 The instrument of this cross-examination is montage. The hinge of the edit is the pivot of the scales that
weigh one account against the other, and the totality of accounts
against a notion of justice, truth, and authenticity. Much is in the balance. Thus, Ophls uses montage to deliver justice from history.
Indonesias relationship to the massacres of 19656 remains beyond
the frame of judicial scrutiny, and much of the evidence that might supply a coherent account has been destroyed. Here the judicial figure cannot be drawn on and history has been rendered incoherent by a stillpresent terror; collecting the fragments and gluing them together will
not produce a coherent whole.
Freuds figure of the eternal city is appropriate here. The image of
contemporary Rome superimposed on the sedimented ruins of ever
more ancient settlements served Freud as a spatial metaphor for the
psyche. Freud found the analogy ultimately unsatisfactory, however.
The architectural figure points to the physical impossibility of two
objects occupying the same space (one building can be built only on the
ruins of another), while in the psyche this co-extensivity is achieved.
A spectral co-extensivity structures the field of social relations the
film involves, and digital layering allows working methods, and produces works, structured by the possibilities of a congruent spectral coextensivity.
In his Theses for a Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin provides
another figure through which to imagine this difference between a process of chronicling structured by syntagmatic contiguity and a historiography that works through successive layering:
Where we perceive a chain of events, he [the angel] 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
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.
Rather than a chain of events, we have layer after layer of wreckage. It

is down through these layers, paradoxically by a working up, that the
archaeological performance proceeds. Working with digitized elements
allows for this simultaneous working down and working up.
These figures tentatively suggest a critical difference between an analogue process of montage and a digital process of layering. They point
to why the formal and technological approach of layering a digital
189
poetics is appropriate to the historical site and historiographic

approach of the film project.
Shared Time
While it may be a relatively obvious point, digital technology enables
practices to be driven by an economy of enthusiasm and commitment
rather than cash; that is, digital technology is relatively cheap. The low
cost of digital video equipment has been a decisive factor in the evolution of not only Vision Machines practice but that of innumerable
activist and community video projects. Digital technology has been a
means of exploring not only media forms but media forums. From production through to exhibition, from simply being able to distribute
tapes, disks, and cameras to developing online collaborative editing
environments, distribution channels, and satellite links, the digital has
opened new ways of generating webs of stories and networked solidarities. Working with relatively localized communities (for instance, palm
plantation workers in North Sumatra or former child soldiers from El
Salvador in Los Angeles), Vision Machine aims to give voice and vision
to the singular stories of these communities. Coming together to make
a medium of creative reflection, the collectives that Vision Machine
works with swap footage and experiences, share tactics of resistance,
and create intercontinental chain stories to fashion dense, multi-layered
works. In effect, these collectives produce a narrative geography.
To underpin the network of collaborators, we are developing a network of social technology. In time, we hope to develop a global Internet-based video-on-demand and streaming system. Collaborating
collectives will upload, download, and recut each others footage as
well as contextualize their work with writing, activist and cultural
links, and other documentation. In London, England, the network
exploits the local East End free wireless network. In more remote locations, we hope to use satellite broadband as well as other available community broadcast infrastructures.
It has long been the dream of activist and avant-garde artists to create
robust alternative distribution and exhibition circuits. Indeed, many
exist. What digital technology offers practices such as ours are tactical
opportunities to exploit a massively expensive global infrastructure.
One of the perennial promises of the Internet has been the possibility to
radically transform the relation between moments of production, dis-
tribution, and exhibition. In ways that we hope will go well beyond the
experiments of the twentieth century avant-garde, this is a promise that
Vision Machine hopes to fulfill.
NOTES
1 From a speech broadcast on PBS, 4 March 1987.
2 Seth Mydans, A Top Khmer Rouge Leader, Going Public, Pleads Ignorance, New York Times, 3 January 2004.
3 Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van
Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
4 From a filmed interview with Vision Machine, 21 July 2004.
5 See especially Benedict Anderson, Petrus Dadi Ratu, New Left Review 3
(MayJune 2000): 9.
6 For excellent background on the United States role, see Peter Dale Scott,
The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 19651967, in Pacific
Affairs 58 (Summer 1985): 23964. For the CIA, State Department, and U.S.
Defense Departments roles, see especially Foreign Relations of the United
States 19641968, vol. 26, documents 142205 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office). Regarding death lists, see document 185, along
with the research of journalist Kathy Kadane.
7 Paul F. Gardner, Shared Hopes, Separate Fears: Fifty Years of U.S.Indonesian
Relations (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 229.
8 See Scott, The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, and also John
Pilgers film The New Rulers of the World (2001). See also Jeffrey Winterss
Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and the Indonesian State (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
9 Commander of Kostrad (Indonesian Army Strategic Reserve) General
Kemal Idris, from a filmed interview with Vision Machine, 20 July 2004.
Footage available upon request. Vision Machine cassettes I317 through 20.
10 Benedict Anderson, afterword to Am I PKI or Non PKI? Indonesia 40 (October 1985).
11 Indonesian member of parliament Permadi received the deathbed confession of Sarwo Edhie. In a July 2004 interview, he says Edhie claimed that
two million were killed. The same report appears in Andersons Petrus
Dadi Ratu. The CIA cites a figure of 100,000 in their own research study
internal report, Indonesia 1965: The Coup That Backfired, December 1965.
Robert Cribb cites 500,000 dead in The Indonesian Killings of 1965/6: Studies
from Java to Bali (Clayton, Australia: Monash University Press, 1990).
191
12 So, for instance, though the systematic terror of the massacres was downplayed for an international public, that very terror was deliberately conjured by the CIA six years later, when, going after Salvador Allende, they
sent cards to key figures on the radical left and the ultra-conservative right,
each day for a month, reading Djakarta se acera (Jakarta is coming). See
Scott, The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, and also Donald
Freed and Fred Simon Landis, Death in Washington (Westport, CT: Lawrence
Hill, 1980), 1045.
13 Vision Machine interviews with victims families suggest that the trauma of
this spectral threat is always linked to the fear of the spectacular return of the
violence.
14 Rivers like the Sungai Brantas, flowing from Kediri through Surabaya, in
East Java, were choked. See P. Rochijat, Am I PKI or Non PKI? Indonesia 40
(October 1985); Cribb, The Indonesian Killings; Peter Dale Scott, Using Atrocities: U.S. Responsibility for the Slaughters in Indonesia and East Timor,
unpublished monograph.
15 Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through is the essay in which
Freud first outlined his ideas on the compulsion to repeat.
16 Vision Machine film project, The Globalisation Tapes, 70 minutes, 2003.
17 Petra Christian University, Performing Art: Ludruk, Popular Theater from
East Java, http://www.petra.ac.id/eastjava/cities/sby/performing.htm.
18 The contemporaneity of this historical project is important to stress. The
profound violence of 19656 still haunts national life; it is neither spoken
nor unspoken, rather, it is whispered, threatened, insinuated into the subtext of daily discourse.
19 Even where multiple analogue tracks might produce comparable results,
similar experiments with re-narration certainly would not be portable
enough to bring to remote villages in the Sumatran plantation belt.
20 The phrase two lies between which emerges the truth is Susan Lords.
Several of this papers key insights were offered by her.
10 From Sequence to Stream: Historiography and

Media Art
susan lo rd
When this present itself ... has become progressively unmoored from tradition,
when media saturation wipes out spatial and temporal difference, by making
every place, every time available to instant replay, then the turn to history and
memory can also be read as an attempt to find a new mooring ... The art of memory counters aesthetic desublimation and the ideology of the anti-aesthetic.1
Andreas Huyssen, Memories of Utopia
Introduction
With the concurrent emergence of database narratives, copyleft, archive
plundering, file sharing, access to classified documents, we are seeing
new elements and formations of the historiographic imaginary of
media artists. In this essay, I explore the relationship between these elements of digital technologies, archives, and databases in the context of
globalization and the political affinities forged under these conditions.
I argue that there is a historiographic imaginary and an aesthetic specific to this confluence of events and processes, and I use the occasion of
this essay to investigate that imaginary.
The first part of the essay is focused on the post-1968 instability of
futurity, which finds its expression in many social and political forms
(dispersions of identity politics after the end of cohesive structures) and
which in media arts is expressed through the language of the history/
memory debates. The second focus of the essay is on the work by digital media artists from the late 1990s until today. The shift from politics
as a project connected to left history, anchored to class analysis and
struggle, to politics as subaltern emergence, affiliated with decoloniza-
Historiography and Media Art
193
tion struggles, has found artists of commitment operating with very

different tools, vocabularies, and ontologies. The difference between
Emile de Antonio and Walid Raad is perhaps the most extreme comparison of that which can be found between Sara Diamonds work of the
1980s and Vision Machines project in development since 2000: the
ontological status of the archive, its truth-yielding potential, has
become unusable for the production of counter-truths. In other words,
this is not merely about timelines of capital or about the ruined index; it
is also about new movements of time and uses of technology that take
place with liquid modernity: the infinite multiplication of truth claims
and their correlative commodification create a condition in which the
interested artist (one concerned with, for example, the Lebanese wars,
Iran-Contras effects, Indonesian genocides, guest workers, a thirtyfour-year civil war in Guatemala) is now forced to relinquish the future
of truth (and, hence, justice) that the interrogated, critically montaged
archive had promised. The archive no longer offers artists a hardsought kernel or crystal of revelation. The archive is now babble the
noise of power. If this is the condition of the archive for Vision Machine,
Walid Raad and the Atlas Group, and The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification then why use it? These are not cynical or merely
formalist projects. These artists are deeply interested in the universals
of their time: the suffering and injustice of global capital. Perhaps what
they share is the effort to create a form for this truth that can get a purchase on the contemporary realization that a history of colonialism produces an archive of spoils through which an artist makes and unmakes
his or her history of the present.
History and Memory
The media arts of the last twenty-five years contain innumerable examples of tangles with history. Some of the most important works of historiography come from feminist artists such as Sara Diamond and the
Womens Labour History Project and the post-colonial identity projects
of, for example, the Black British film and video collectives of the 1980s
and early 1990s. Isaac Julien, the Sankofa Collective, John Akomfrah,
and the Black Audio Film Collective took on the enormous project of
historiography of the African diaspora from the decidedly post-colonial vantage of hybridity and personalized passages. Similar to Julie
Dash, Rea Tajiri, some of the work of Trinh T Minh Ha, and Richard
Fung, these identity-based projects differ from the work of Walid
194 Susan Lord
Raads because they believed an alternative history the untold story,

the counter-history could be spoken, or, more precisely, imaged. Such
imaging was refracted through the working-through of trauma, memory, fantasy, and forgetting. But, the imaging was referential. There was
an ethical imperative in this work. Andreas Huyssen discusses the history/memory debate in terms of the problems of futurity:
Whatever the specific content of the many contemporary debates about
history and memory may be, underlying them is a fundamental disturbance not just of the relationship between history as objective and scientific, and memory as subjective and personal, but of history itself and its
promises. At stake in the current history/memory debate is not only a disturbance of our notions of the past, but a fundamental crisis in our imagination of alternative futures.2
The shifts in historical consciousness are brought into focus when we

consider the memory works of politically engaged media artists of the
1980s and 1990s alongside the contemporary activist media artists.
Activist media in these opening years of the millennium has burgeoned
from a few in the crowd left-wing media artists to thousands of digitalvideo-carrying protesters from the anti-capitalist, largely anarchist,
international crowds.3 Images, evidence, testimonies, factoids, and
demands for change comprise the intense present of the activist archive.
This present tense is arguably part of digital culture, broadly speaking,
and it has been met with a range of responses, from fear of the loss of cultural memory to jubilation over the instantaneousness of what is hoped
to be history-in-the-making. In response to Homi Bhabhas assertion
that there is a danger that the presentism of the net may drain everyday life of its historical memory,4 the Indymedia.org peoples message
is that there is no time but the present to help hunger-striker Simon
Chapman (a young man arrested by Italian police during the antiglobalization demonstration in Genoa, 2001). Although Indymedia
.orgs website offers a page of Internet links to activist libraries, few of
the images I could find date from before the mid-1990s. That the activist
media are being undertaken by a largely under-thirty-year-old group of
people raised in a vehemently anti-aging era is but one way to understand the shift in temporal consciousness that has taken place since the
activist/politically engaged old new-media artists of the 1970s and
1980s busied themselves in the interrogation, assemblage, and reordering of archives. That work on the archive was a critical engagement with
195
history as a project of human creation and, as such, an extension of a

modern, Western project of historicity and political imagination where
the future was thinkable, albeit unknowable and unstable, and where
one sequence of temporal events, although internally unified, can be
radically discontinuous from another. This kind of temporality can also
be understood as filmic, and its practice is that of montage. Media artists
of the 70s and 80s were, however, situated between the filmic and digital consciousness; they were more properly in the flow of televisual
broadcasting thinking in video (Sara Diamond), television (Emile de
Antonio), and heterogeneous modes (Chris Marker). Thus, the archive
raiders of this period were granted a moment of collision between time
zones, historiographical processes, media, and politics.5
The juxtaposition of these two moments of political media that of,
say, Indymedia.org and Grin without a Cat or Millhouse or The Womens
Labour History Project produces a series of questions about the politics of time as it relates to the takeover of historical documentary by The
History Channel, the privatization of archives, the de-lefting of anticapitalist culture, the culture of obsolescence and the expansion of the
memory industry, and the institutionalization of the artists and intellectuals of the 1970s and 1980s. If we accept Allan Antliffs claim that all
activist media is anarchist, then the culture of the left is not only concerned with history, it has actually become historical.6 But there is more
to the story. The intense present of digital activism lives alongside what
Andreas Huyssen calls the global memory industry: the seduction of
the archive and its trove of stories of human achievement and suffering
has never been greater. The form in which we think the past is increasingly memory without borders rather than national history within borders and has been read variably, argues Huyssen, as a bulwark against
obsolescence, an attack of the present on the rest of time, and a sign of
the loss of national or communal memory.7
In their interview/conversation of Chris Markers Grin without a
Cat, Yael Simpson Fletcher and Nalini Persaud discuss the cascades of
time and event that replace a linear historiography of the left in
Markers film. I quote the following passage at length because it points
to several important aspects of Markers project that concern me here:
the creation of an aesthetic and politics of time; the expansive media
archive; the particularity of human suffering.
One of the difficulties with discussing GWC is that the overt chronologies
indicated in the initial voice-overs for each section From Vietnam to
196 Susan Lord

Ches Death; May 1968 and All That; From the Prague Spring to the
Common Program of Government in France; From Chile to What?
make us think that there is a clear linear narrative, but really it is narrative
segments swirling around, making all kinds of marvelous patterns. And
the titles of the two parts, Fragile Hands and Broken Hands [referring to
the May 1968 poster From the Fragile Hands of the Students to the Strong
Hands of the Workers], bring us to the powerful poetic dimension of
GWC. Time and space dont appear to be defined by the linearity and contiguity imposed by our experience of one day appearing after another day
only to go into another day. Instead, one precipitating event leads to a cascade of other events as a way of explaining what has been viewed. And
mixed with footage of the various presents are interviewees and narrators voices assessing events from the vantage points of the time during
the assemblage of the film [early to mid-1970s], sometimes of 1977, when
the film was completed, and sometimes of 1993, when the reedited video
was released. In many ways, the continuities lie in the images: funerals,
crowds of demonstrators, police repression, leaders speaking.8
The abiding concern for class in the political media arts from the
1960s to the 1980s was inextricable from a historical consciousness
about political life; that is, to be left was to be historical insofar as the
future was thinkable. The image banks that constitute the work undertaken by Marker or Sara Diamond, for example, can be understood as
having emerged from a process of working through the problematic
polarity between historical consciousness and memory work: images
taken from public archives are set within a Brechtian fiction (Diamond)
or poised against the personal archives of social subjects of the
documentaries; personal testimonies are set against public records; and,
in Diamonds own personally derived works, layers of memory are
strewn between and disturb the public face of the loved one. The dual
work on history raises a series of questions relevant beyond the specifics of any one artists work. What do we want from the past? What longing is the image performing? Is the image from the past activated by an
interrogation of its status as truth or is the image from the past an
unquestioned testimony of injustice? But what meaning for the present
or future is suffering supplying for us? The answer to this question, as
posited from a Marxist position, is the fact of the continuity of oppression. This consciousness is what motivates the assemblage of a left
archive and what informs the montage of sequences. In an article analysing Patricio Guzmns films about Chile, memory, and history, Tho-
197
mas Miller Klubock discusses the dynamic between the distortions of

memory found in testimonial footage and historys meta-narratives
found in archival material as a necessary tension for the process of
social change: While memory guides history to issues of critical importance for the present, history critically engages personal memory to
establish the conditions for collective forms of recollection and solidaristic action.9
Working on this project today, as we view one night Indymedia.orgs
footage of police beating protesters and then the next day images of the
beatings of the On-to-Ottawa trekkers in 1935, of the juntas disappeared, of the American governments hide and seek with Vietnam,
the issue of learning from the past comes hard and fast to mind. Yet,
as Huyssen writes, the enlightened notion that one can learn from history has been so violently disproved both at the social and political levels as well as in its experiential dimension that the very legitimacy of
the historical enterprise is shaken.10 Here, the artists of globalism and
the third millennium present us with new soft architectures of being
historical.
The Image of History and the Politics of Time
When Roland Barthes mourns the death of his mother in a series of
meditations on the photograph, he writes, History is hysterical: it is
constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it and in order to
look at it, we must be excluded from it.11 Walter Benjamins formative
text for our thinking about history, our responsibility to the past, is likewise practised through the act of looking at an image which flashed up
at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again.12 And
Hayden Whites contribution to modern historiography presents us
with the question of not just the fragility, instability, or ephemerality of
modernitys historical referent, but of the very possibility of representing the modern historical event. In each instance, it is the image and its
readability or our ability to read the image that redeems history.
History is the supplement of the image. In Gilles Deleuzes Letter to
Serge Daney, wherein he engages Daneys work on cinema, he presents a periodization of cinema in terms of three functions of the image:
the encyclopedia of the world and the beautification of nature (early
cinema); the pedagogy of perception and the spiritualization of nature
(postwar and visionary cinema); and the professional training of the
eye (television), which is about being in contact with technology ... a
198 Susan Lord
privileged spectator allowed into the wings, in contact with the image,
entering into the image.13 The function of the image for thought
(Deleuzes question) raises different questions than does the status of
the image in relation to its historical referent, its status as document or
visible evidence. Deleuze and Daneys periodization is helpful for
understanding the work of media artists who think history in terms of
images. The modern event the holocaustal event which White
discusses as that which exists as image, was confronted by filmmakers
such as Alain Resnais as a problem for seeing: can I bring myself to
look at what I cant help seeing.14 Behind the image is nothing: You see
nothing as El says to Elle in Hiroshima Mon Amour; thus it is the surface
of the image itself that we must learn to read as it unfolds before us.
Montage became secondary, giving way not only to the famous
sequence shot, but to new forms of composition and combination.15
The new-media artist of the contemporary period works within the
third phase of periodization; and this idea of slipping into an image
because each image now slips across other images could best be understood in terms of streaming. In the shift in historiographic practices
from sequence to stream, the works reflect on the political, ethical, and
aesthetic stakes and possibilities of spacetime compression, instantaneity, simultaneity, and so forth that arise with the confluence of globalization and digital media. The vertical historiographic imaginary of
these practices is one built on a given of the intense interconnectivity of
global flows. Sean Cubitts chapter in this volume is concerned to
present a specificity of the digital aesthetic. Networks and connectivities
of technologies of capital become the content of works whose ostensible
subjects are unavailable to the sequential forms of representation:
In the information economy, the nodes are functions of their networks.
The global today is necessarily prior to the local, especially those localities
that, like the border-free trade zones of Tijuana studied by Coco Fusco, are
sites of oppression. The reality of a woman forced into prostitution by the
strategic requirements of the global economy cannot be photographed. No
indexical account, anchored in the preeminence of the local in industrial
culture, would be sufficient to understand the forces acting on her. A photograph would only stir the sentimentality defined a hundred years ago
by the novelist Meredith: pleasure without responsibility. Responsibility
today derives not from empathy, and certainly not from metropolitan prurience, but from understanding the networks that force her into this double economic and sexual oppression. The task of an iconic art is no longer
199
to depict but to articulate the symbolic regimes that describe, define and
give meaning both to her experience and to that of her oppressors, who
include every user of the computers she builds when not supplementing
her non-union subsistence wages with sex labour in the tourist economy.
The digital artwork must be networked, and the formation of alternative
networks is a critical function of them.16
Streams, Simultaneities, and Recombinant Histories

As Jeffrey Skoller makes clear in his recent Shadows, Specters, Shards:
Making History in Avant-Garde Film, the experimental tradition of cinema offers a dynamic range of works that resist or refuse to represent or
re-recreate the past, for such specularization and literalization of the
past construct a gap between now and then, closing off past from
present, limiting the complex ways different moments of time commingle, inscribe, and inflect each other.17 Instead, the avant-garde tradition
attends to the unseen, unspeakable, ephemeral elements of the past, the
very unrepresentability of which makes the present. Films such as Signal Germany in the Air by Ernie Gehr or Utopia by James Benning (as
well as the numerous other works Skoller discusses) think history
through the materiality of the cinematic form and make present the
past through strategies of duration, editing, and soundimage dissonance. Of Skollers impressive range of analysis, I have found two formulations especially useful for the digital work I discuss in this essay:
the concepts of sideshadowing and virtuality. Virtuality is taken
from Deleuze as a dynamic between the actual and the virtual, between
incompossibles (co-existence of exclusive or divergent not-necessarily
true pasts). The virtual is not the possible but the potential for change
over time that is generated by the powers of the false: undecidability
between what is true, what was actual, and what is potential.18 Work
by Walid Raad and the Atlas Group is especially given to a virtual
analysis. This is also true, but to a lesser intensity, for The Speculative
Archive and the Terminal Time project.
Sideshadowing is developed by Michael Andr Bernstein in his Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History as a means to create
historical narratives in which the multiple possibilities for the outcome of
historical events can coexist alongside the actual outcome of events. By critiquing older narrative tropes of historical writing such as backshadowing
and foreshadowing as producing the sense of inevitability or causality in
200 Susan Lord

what are actually random events, sideshadowing opens the possibility for
narrative forms that can render events in all their complexity rather than
as binaristic narratives of cause and effect ... While sideshadowing does
not deny the reality or historicity of an event, it creates an awareness of the
indeterminacy of relations between events. There is no inevitable outcome
to anything, because so many things are happening simultaneously.19
In Skollers elaboration of this form of historiography in the experimental traditions, he turns to Eleanor Antins The Man without a World, Ken
Jacobs Urban Peasants, and Daniel Eisenbergs Cooperation of Parts. Each
of these films reflects on the Jewish cultural histories that were lived
out during and after the Holocaust. The indeterminacy between events,
the simultaneity of events, and the unfulfilled or unrealized possibilities of the past are qualities that adhere to works such as the database
narrative Tracing the Decay of Fiction by Pat ONeill (in conjunction with
the Labyrinth Project at USCs Annenberg Center for Communication);
the Recombinant History Projects Terminal Time; Linda Wallaces Living
Tomorrow; and Ross Gibson and Kate Richardss Life after Wartime. For
each of these works, the structure exposes or thematizes the dual
processes of selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories.20 The coeval relation between events is heightened through the
deployment of a random dynamic between archive and database. For
example, Gibson and Richardss Life after Wartime is a CD-ROM and
installation project that comprises images from an archive of crime
scene photographs from Sydney, Australia, from 1945 to 1960 combined
with remains of text fragments that function as captions to the images
when the work is played. The combination of digital archive and
random-selection database yields a heightened sense of simultaneity,
temporal interconnectivities, and vertical narrative structures. The
explanatory text for the CD-ROM underscores the select and combine
historiographic mode:
There are 2 scenes in the Life After Wartime CD-ROM. In the first, choose
from the image stream by clicking on an image. After 3 choices an image/
text/music sequence plays. Choices in scene 1 influence the image flow in
that scene. Each choice in scene 1 is constructing a web-like meta-narrative
in the other scene, forming around various characters and locations. These
are represented by accumulated glimpses, rumours and facts. Hold
the mouse down on the glimpses thumbnails to see the enlarged image.
Toggle between scenes using the spinning icon. The ESC key returns you
201
to the startup screen at any time without affecting progress (click on PLAY
to continue). It will take you hours to explore Life After Wartime. It is recommended that you SAVE/LOAD your progress from the startup
screen.21
In her exhibition text for Linda Wallaces work Living Tomorrow, Victoria Lynn elaborates on the connection between streaming, layering,
and the indeterminacy of the archives limits: Linda Wallace has created an archive of images which are transferred into Mpeg2 files that
then (in Lindas words) peel away from the database, streaming
(metaphorically) into the three separate yet connected screens you see
here. The question raised by the work is: where does the archive begin
and end and where does the interface to it begin and end? She further
discusses the digital artists work by differentiating it from the modernist montage: The digital stream makes montage dynamic. While a
collagist travels through imagery and memory at their work table, an
electronic media artist can travel through imagery within space and
time, distorting, reversing, editing, remixing, splintering, fragmenting,
pivoting, mirroring, masking and layering through software filters.22
What we need to add to this formalist approach is the political concerns
that inhere not just as content but as that which yields specific forms.
In post-colonial and globalization studies, the representational strategies employed to address the radical temporalities that emerge in the
contexts of cultural difference and the politics of decolonization have
been analysed by writers such as Homi Bhabha and Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as Latin Americanists such as Nestor Garcia Canclini and
Angel Rama, who have been influenced by Fernando Ortizs theory of
transculturation. Bhabha and Chakrabarty in particular argue that the
analysis of the social formations and cultural enunciations of temporality permit us to think other forms of worlding (Chakrabarty) as coexistent and as possible.23 As Bhabha has written: What is in modernity more than modernity is the disjunctive post-colonial time and space
that makes its presence felt at the level of enunciation.24 In Latin American studies, Canclini and Rama advance Ortizs theories of transculturation, as opposed to acculturation, as a means by which to understand
how cultural difference fractures the time of modernity.
In the formation of cultural identity in cross-cultural encounters there
are, of course, various cultures of time and accompanying orders/theories of history: aesthetic-narrative, economic-rationalist, national-monumental, cultural-ritualist, gender-psychic, revolutionary-utopian, and
202 Susan Lord
so forth. And these larger or macro-temporalities never exist one without another; nor do they exist without a correlative practice in everyday
life. These macro-temporalities come into existence as such with modernity, and hence with colonialism and with the difference the encounter
brings into history. Of the many Eurocentric traps available to the critic
studying cultures of time is one laid out extensively in Johannes
Fabians Time and the Other. His critique concerns the moral, ethical, and
epistemological consequences of anthropologys advancement of colonialism through the tool of evolutionary time (the sequentialization/
spatialization of time): It promoted a scheme in terms of which not only
past cultures, but all living societies were irrevocably placed on a temporal slope, a stream of Time some upstream, others downstream.
Civilization, evolution, development, acculturation, modernization
(and their cousins, industrialization, urbanization) are all terms whose
conceptual content derives, in ways that can be specified, from evolutionary Time.25 Written in 1983, this critique of Eurocentric, modern
anthropology is now familiar, and specific variants have been vigorously taken up in ethnography and documentary film studies. Particularly useful to the digital forms of database narratives and recombinant
histories is his corrective: an argument for coeval temporality. He
argues that because the history of the discipline of anthropology reveals
that the use of naturalized-spatialized time almost invariably is made
for the purpose of distancing those who are observed from the time of
the observer, a critical praxis can be built through, first of all, a recognition of the contemporaneity and synchrony of observer/observed.
Two works that are particularly interesting to consider in terms of
this idea of coeval temporality within the context of colonial history and
globalization are Terminal Time and Vision Machines ongoing project
about the genocides in Indonesia. Terminal Time is well described and
analysed by Steve Anderson in Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and
Recombinant History26 and Vision Machines project is presented by
two of the collective members, Michael Uwemedimo and Joshua Oppenheimer, in this volume. Briefly then, Terminal Time, created in 2000
by a group of artists, computer scientists, and filmmakers, is an artificial intelligence-based interactive multimedia apparatus that constructs
real-time historical documentaries covering the past 1000 years of
human history. The database consists of thousands of image stills, commentaries, and video clips. The recombinant histories produced from
this material are broken down into three parts representing three
epochal periods of time. The interactivity is enacted through audience
responses to the presentation of the apparatus (survey questions are
203
measured and coded through the use of an applause meter) first in the
form of genuine responses to survey questions that are intended to
refine and focus [the audiences] attitudes towards ideologies of race,
gender, colonialism, technological positivism, etc. The content of the
documentaries reflects a slightly exaggerated version of the audiences
stated values; and in the second presentation they are asked to elicit
different responses to the apparatus. These are then recombined, and
the apparatus presents a final version that reveals the structuring of historical thinking and ideological interests in history, as well as the layering of discontinuities, webs of stories, and the coeval temporalities of
contested interests in historical events. According to Anderson, Terminal Time presents a three-pronged critique of documentary conventions,
historical authorship and utopian discourses of interactivity ... Terminal
Time offers a form of participatory history in which individuals and
groups are positioned as possessing the potential to radically alter conceptions of the past.27
Terminal Times politics of time is activated through its performative
layering of historys construction, as well as through its critical deployment of the technology of storage and retrieval systems, artificial intelligence, communications industries, and foreshadowed paths of
history. While all of Terminal Times facts are true, the apparatus is
interested in demonstrating the productive power of the false.
Vision Machines project also works with documentary material and
participant-observers, but here the interactivity is not given to database
narratives but to re-enactments and digital layerings of evidence and
interpretation, obfuscation and silence. While ideology critique is certainly an effect of their project, the trauma that lies at the heart of Snake
River and The Globalization Tapes requires a different mode of analysis:
digital layering of historical excavation and histrionic reconstruction,
which combine to produce what they call an archeological performance. The historiographic method produced by Vision Machine produces a density most usefully understood in terms of sideshadowing
because the history is literally haunted with an unrepresentable and
irrecoverable history of the genocide of between 100,000 to 2,000,000
Indonesians during the anti-communist campaign of terror that began
in October 1965. The innumerability is also used as a form of terror. As
Uwemedimo and Oppenheimer explain, To excavate the history of the
massacres, Vision Machine has developed a research and production
method that is perhaps best thought of as an archaeological performance. Between a buried historical event, and its re-staging with historical actors, this method opens a process of simultaneous historical
204 Susan Lord
excavation (working down through strata), and histrionic reconstruction

(adding layers of stylized performance and recounting).
There is one specific part of Vision Machines project Reconstructed Speech: Successive Layers over Silence that presents this
most clearly. Vision Machine retrieved previously classified footage of a
speech by William Colby, head of the CIA during the 1960s, about the
progress of democracy in Southeast Asia; while the image track has
been unclassified, the soundtrack remains classified. In order to bring
the text to light, they hired a lip reader to interpret Colby. Each pass at
the interpretation is layered upon the previous. After eight passes,
which captured only fragments, they showed the tape to one of Vision
Machines collaborators in Indonesia who is a visionary. During one of
the Ludruk troupes performances, the visionary was possessed by the
ghost of William Colby. In the trance, Colbys bureaucratic language
was replaced by commands from Colby to an executioner in the same
village as the visionary. So, in this one fragment of the project William
Colby is standing and moving his lips, the audio passes are heard in
overlapping registers of differing volume and tone of the lip reader, the
passes are registered on the image track like waves, and then an Indonesian voice is layered among the others. The executioner, in another
part of Snake River, re-enacts his acts of execution as historical performance. The use of Indonesian opera and other generic devices is a means
by which the successive layers of trauma are made present. As Uwemedimo and Oppenheimer write, The domain of ghosts is parallel to,
and distinct from, the world of the living. Yet it occupies the same
space.28
The contemporary projects of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group,
Vision Machine, and The Speculative Archive for Historical Clarification each undertake their historiography from within a digital aesthetic. And, for all three, the politics of globalization is rooted in the
arms trade and militarization of the world from the Vietnam period
through the Iran-Contra and the contemporary history that such forms
of globalization have produced. For Vision Machine and The Speculative Archive, the secret and the hidden, the obfuscated and the erased,
form a powerful imaginary for their historiographies. The work on and
with historical evidence testimony, material from the recently unclassified archives of the American government, and other records of historical fact yields a network of truth and falsehood. But where for
Vision Machine the ghosts and sideshadowed histories expand the
screen of historiography, The Speculative Archive is concerned with the
way in which the document is always about secrecy and obfuscation.
205
That is, the ostensible fact is a productive fiction. The project produces
documents based in the declassified and partially declassified materials from the United States government; as well, they work with the way
in which the government documents classified material that is, the
way the state creates its archive of secrets.
The Speculative Archive is interested in the way state self-documentation functions to produce both a particular history and a potential
history a fork in time that brings multiple secrets into a type of composite. For example, their tape Its Not My Memory of It is composed
of three sets of potentialities, each one opening with an interview given
by a government official involved in the regulation and release of
secret material. The confidence of power that gives agency to these
officials and the way in which a particular historiography is produced
by the culture of secrecy are themes that in themselves deserve attention. I want to briefly discuss the first of the three parts. It opens with
Charlie Talbott deputy director of the Directorate for Freedom of
Information and Security Review in the Pentagon speaking about
how the Freedom of Information Act functions. He provides an example of how in the time of the Iran hostage crisis during Jimmy Carters
administration the Washington Post requested all the top-secret information on the crisis; ten years of litigation later, thirty-two linear feet of
paper was reduced to one linear foot. He explains the way in which
declassification guidelines work and so forth. After his testimony, the
tape continues with a rescued document: a text that had been shredded
by the U.S. embassy in Tehran, rescued by a group of Iranian students,
and pieced back together. The Speculative Archives project here is to
animate the restoration of the text, with a voice-over of a subject of the
text an Iranian man named as a CIA informant. In the animation of
the text, strips of shredded paper are aligned and realigned in an effort
to bring sense to the text. The voice-over analyses the various potentialities of meaning in the recombinant secrets as they are streamed
before us.
Walid Raad and the Atlas Group is virtual and is located between
Beirut and New York City. In the projects use of fictive and historical
data of the Lebanese wars, it undertakes the unmaking of the archive
and its atrocity aesthetics by deploying the power of the false and a
constellational historiographic mode facilitated by digital processes.
While the Atlas Group is the virtual diasporic name of Walid Raads
art context and collaborative network, Raad himself appears with the
work, performing the inevitable artists talk as an extension of the work
of debilitating the fetishization of fact. In one instance of this perfor-
206 Susan Lord
mance, Raad, while performing the set up for the presentation projected his computers desktop on the screen. The desktop is replete with
folder icons, each given a precise archival title such that in combination we see the potentiality of a complex history. In fact, each folder is
empty producing one moment in a virtual historiography of the Lebanese wars. Other elements in the project include a videotape of The
Dead Weight of Quarrel Hangs, archival photographs from media events
where important political and military figures are shown standing
around bomb craters, an installation sculpture of one such bomb crater,
a digital database of information about the Lebanese wars, and material
from a historian of Lebanon. This diary is filled with notations related
to the horse races attended by Prof. and other intellectuals. The concern
over the winning horse, the timing of that win, and so forth are at once
obsessional absurdities of the control, precision, and measurement of
facts that anchor war to both capital and national history, and are
expressive of the sense of the gamble of history, the random access to
events, the impossibility of certainty, and the incompossible relationship between chance and structure. This mapping of virtual history is at
once fictive and virtually true. The relationship between chance and
structure is expressed here by one critics description of a part of the
project:
Generally, My Neck is Thinner than a Hair deals with the history of car
bombings during the civil war. Specifically, it delves into one particular
explosion, a car detonated in the Beirut neighborhood of Furn al-Shubbak
on January 21, 1986. With colleagues Tony Chakar and Bilal Khbeiz, Raad
formed a research team of sorts, gathering anything they could get their
hands on, and limiting their search to a fifty-three-day frame. The three
assembled press reports, television news footage, radio programs, and
interview transcripts. They trawled through the neighborhood and interviewed people living there now about the bombing.29
The Atlas Group resists the atrocity aesthetics that are inevitably produced through the victimologies of documentary projects by interceding with potential narratives and random structures of composition.
Conclusion
The storied or fabular nature of historical knowledge the meaningfulness given to fact has been taken by new-media artists as a given,
207
which they then work on through their particular ethical, political,

and aesthetic projects. While they are arguably artist-historiographers,
whether working through public archives, classified documents, or
abandoned materials, they produce a historicity that asks us to think
otherwise about records or dominant formations of historical knowledge. They also require from us an attention to the interconnections of
silence upon which the babble of the archive is built a silence produced by genocide, by the political jockeying over and fetishization of
facts, by excisions and direct acts of censorship, by the arms trade, and
by fear.
This essay works through a number of historiographic modes developed by media artists since the 1970s. I explored the shift from
sequenced temporal relations and the attendant political engagements
of left history to the streamed aesthetic contemporary digital sideshadows and virtual images of potential histories and global networks.
I wish to end the essay with a dialogue about history that took place
between Walid Raad and Tony Chakar because it expresses the problematics faced by the engaged, historiographic artist.
There is this notion of chronological history where the past is certain, the present is certain, the future is certainly coming, says Chakar.
But there is no history. There is a huge catastrophe thats in the making all the time. There is wreckage that is piled upon wreckage and
thats it. I dont like when work I do or that Walid does is presented as
an alternative history to something else, as if it is trying to find a place
so it can evacuate the other history. I wouldnt give up the term
alternative history, adds Raad. But not an alternative history that is
necessarily additional or that must be thought of as something that
completes something that was missing. It might contradict, it might
just add temporarily and then disappear ... A reductive notion of traditional history is written as a chronology of massacres, of events, or a
biography of participants. We are not saying history should not
include this. We are certainly saying that history cannot be reduced to
this ... We are trying to find those stories that people tend to believe,
[that] acquire their attention in a fundamental way, even if they have
nothing to do with what really happened. Traditional history tends to
concentrate on what really happened, as if its out there in the world,
and it tends to be the history of conscious events. Most peoples experience of these events ... is predominantly unconscious and concentrates
on facts, objects, experiences, and feelings that leave traces and should
be collected.30
208 Susan Lord

NOTES
1 Andreas Huyssen, Memories of Utopia, in Twilight Memories: Marking Time
in a Culture of Amnesia (London: Routledge, 1995), 100.
2 Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2.
3 This discussion of activism, yesterday and today, is drawn from my essay
Activating History: Sara Diamond and the Womens Labour History
Project, in Working on Screen: Representations of the Working Class in Canadian
Cinema, ed. Malek Khouri and Darrell Varga (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2006).
4 Homi Bhabha, preface to Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media and the Politics of
Place, ed. Hamid Naficy (London: Routledge, 1999), viii.
5 For more on the relation between modern historiography, temporality, and
media, I strongly recommend Philip Rosens Change Mummified: Cinema,
Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), especially chapter 3, which works through the theories of historiographer Reinhart Koselleck, and chapter 8 on old and new media.
6 Allan Antliff, Anarchist Modernism: Art, Politics and the First American Avant
Garde (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
7 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 5 and 11. It should be noted that much of the literature on memory to which Huyssen refers addresses the Holocaust and
other, more recent, traumas of global violence, such as the disappeared of
Latin America. While I am not making a homology between the subject matter of Diamonds tapes and the Holocaust, for instance, there is much to be
said about the trauma of gender and class violence and poverty and their
occlusions and distortions in the written and visual history of modernity.
The reliance on oral testimony for the production of a counter-history of
class and gender makes Huyssens remarks especially cogent for the material with which Diamond is working.
8 Yael Simpson Fletcher and Nalini Persaud, Scenes from the Revolution: A
Dialogue on Film, Politics, and History, Radical History Review 91 (winter
2005): 172.
9 Thomas Miller Klubock, History and Memory in Neoliberal Chile: Patricio
Guzmns Obstinate Memory and The Battle of Chile, Radical History Review 85
(2003): 274.
10 Huyssen, Present Pasts, 5.
11 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard
Howard (New York: Hill and Wang/ Noonday, 1981), 65.
12 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History, in Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.
209
13 Gilles Deleuze, Letter to Serge Daney: Optimism, Pessimism and Travel, in

Negotiations, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995), 72, 71.
14 Serge Daney, quoted in Deleuze, Letter, 69.
15 Deleuze, Letter, 69.
16 Sean Cubitt, Precepts for a Digital Artwork, in this volume.
17 Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film
(Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2005), xv.
18 Ibid., 978.
19 Ibid., xxxix.
20 Marsha Kinder, cited in Steve Anderson, Select and Combine: The Rise of
Database Narratives, res magazine, JanuaryFebruary 2004, 52.
21 Ross Gibson and Kate Richards, Read-Me.txt, Life after Wartime, CD-ROM
(Australia, 2003).
22 Victoria Lynn, Archive Montage Network: The Art of Linda Wallace,
Opening Remarks, Montevideo, 11 March 2005, www.machinehunger.
com.au/LivingTomorrow/VictoriaLynn_launch.pdf.
23 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Marxism after Marx: History, Subalternity and Difference, in Marxism beyond Marx, ed. S. Makdisi, C. Casarino, and R.E. Karl
(London: Routledge, 1996), 62.
24 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 251. See
also DisseminNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern
Nation, in Nation and Narration, ed. Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge,
1990).
25 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Other (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
26 Steve Anderson, Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant
History, in Interactive Frictions, ed. Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson
(Berkeley: University of California Press, forthcoming ).
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, The Atlas Group Opens Its Archives, http://
www.bidoun.com/articles/atlasgroup.html.
30 Quoted in ibid.
11 The Birth of Tragedy in Digital Aesthetics

gl e n n wi l l mo t t
We are used to the idea that everything is a medium: everything is

structured, coded, communicated, instituted, informed, textualized,
and thus mediated. We are used to the idea that nothing is simply
present to us, without that supplement of a medium, the medium and
its own message. We are even used to the artist who gestures toward
that, who routinely abandons herself, himself, and ourselves that part
of ourselves subject to forgetting to the prisonhouses of media. Even
the most superficially strange, the most desperately new, aesthetic form
all too readily cloaks a compulsively reproduced art object, that mirror
in which we see ourselves artists and audience alike over and over
again as a McLuhanesque clich, the media artist. What kind of art
could work otherwise? Can art help but objectify as object or event, as
mastered form and product, the work of the media upon us work that
is driven by bodies of force and desire, dead and living, beyond any
such self-image, any such mastery?
This question has been asked before, as early as the modernist
dada events and other happenings. But the digital revolution, if Sean
Cubitt is right, recasts this question as a demand: against the thingness of world, body and other and, one might add, of art itself, arises
a demand for their mutual interpenetration, so dissolving self
and mastery in a deliberate invocation of the liberating void that is
the presence of loss and death in a materialist universe.1 The grounds
for such an aesthetic have already been laid. For the limits of self
and mastery, and, moreover, says Nietzsche, the limits of representation itself, are the domain of tragedy. In digital art, tragedy is being
reborn.
The Birth of Tragedy in Digital Aesthetics
211
Deep Media
But there are surface media, and there are deep media. On the surface
are all those particular media of which we are normally aware, because
they are immediate to us and are the media with which our bodies and
senses directly interface (the computer terminal our hands are typing
upon, the electric light our eyes are ranging across, the roads our vehicles are traversing, the radio our ears are hearing). Deep media, however, are never immediate to us, as they underlie the current production
and existence of surface media themselves (machinery behind the electronic network, the labouring body behind the machinery, the electronic network behind the weapons of mass destruction). When you
have a deep medium that is dominant in a society, that underlies at
some level all or most other media (hence social communication and
individual subject formation), you have the oral or print cultures
described by McLuhan, the gift or commodity cultures described by
Mauss, or the artisanal and feudal or industrial and capitalist cultures described by Marx.2 Whether deep media are thought more in
terms of language systems, or of economic or other systems, their function has always been grounded in symbolic exchange and the reproduction of values, which is to say, a signifying system, a textuality.
I might set before myself a typical commodity, say a small tin can
containing cocktail sausages. Such a tin does not simply present to me
the anticipated referent within, of course, but also communicates to me
its label, the image, the printed text, and a whole world of fantasy and
desire, a mythology of weiner-sausageness the depths of whose connotations only Roland Barthes could plumb, and whose commodification
only Andy Warhol could completely de-reify in the absurdity of a
restored human creative gesture. It does all this, even as it also presents
the can itself, which I try to forget, but which Ive bought into the
world of preserved food storage that structures my diet, of industrial
processes and countless scientists, investors, managers, labourers, who
make the can, refine the metal, dig the ore, etc. the whole world of
global work and movement of capital which makes this unobtrusive
little thing possible, as Marx reminds us. There is a great grinding, suffering, joyous world a world that is no more or less than a particular
and powerful, perhaps precarious, condition of our present history
produced and reproduced, which is to say textualized and communicated, in my purchase and consumption of these sausages. This is a
212 Glenn Willmott
world that depends on and is now inseparable from systems of digital

technology. Not only are media everywhere, but so is the digital, at
some profound, mundane, and subsonic level, increasingly making all
of the systems described above possible. That is the revolutionary
interest of the digital not as a special or new medium, but as a newly
containing or enabling medium that reaches far beyond its own hardand software to create new foundations for us: our art, our weather, our
work, our friendships. Its etymology already warns us its got its fingers in everything.
If you think the fingers are your own, you incline toward a bright
digital romance; if not, toward a dark digital fate. But if you feel that
both romance and fate ring somehow false in the virtual world, you
have felt the digital revolution.
Digital Revolution
Existing ideas of digital revolution have generally articulated one of
two romances: (1) the digital object world, i.e., automation as the basis
of a postindustrial information economy, will free us collectively from
all but virtual labour, and a real-time utopia will flourish; or (2) the
digital subject world, i.e., cybernetic communication as the basis of a
postmodern sense of identity will free us individually in the development of ourselves, and a virtual utopia will flourish. Neither romance
implies the other, nor, most of us will again agree, is likely in itself. Yet
these antithetical romances, objective and subjective, may be seen as
complementary fantasies emanating from our brushes with new deep
media in which the real and the virtual lurk without distinguishing
themselves, as do banality and bliss.
For if Jim Davis and Michael Stack are right, the digital deep medium
is initiating a radically new mode of production which is, tendentially,
the basis of a world in which work and play, art and life, are no longer
the antinomies they have become in the modern world.3 This is not simply another utopian vision extrapolated from what digital machines
can do, nor the experience offered to their users, as with the romances
mentioned above. Digitization promises something deeper, less visible,
and immediate, which is to liberate production itself from commodification hence culture from reification, labour from alienation, and scarcity from class struggle so bringing capitalism and its particular evils,
as Marxist philosophy has long understood them, to an end. This is a
tall order, but while Davis and Stacks utopian argument may have its
213
weaknesses, its point of departure, which is to see digitization at the

roots of a structural mode of production below the surface of other
media, is for Marxist dialectics and digital aesthetics alike highly suggestive.4 This point of departure allows the digital product to be
grasped in our times as a capitalist product, a commodity, whose value
depends upon ratios of labour and other commodity values in the marketplace (in relation to a surplus value or profit, of course, which is
accumulated by a wealthy class at the expense of a deprived one). In
brief, Davis and Stack argue that digital production will lead to a catastrophic depreciation of labour value, thus to the dissolution of commodity value as required for the generation of profits. The digital
revolution is not a revolution in objects, nor in subjects, but in the values the systems of value production, reproduction, and exchange
that circulate between the two.
Digitization offers a universal rendering that is resource-conservative, cheap to store and transport, and easy to copy, meter, and manipulate. Digital rendering thus liberates information from the constraints
of any particular medium and raises the possibility of the liberation of
information from the constraints of scarcity and rationing by price:
easy and cheap replicability means that whatever can be digitally rendered can be made universally available.5 So, not only does digitization
tendentially destroy by supplanting the commodity value of human
labour across nearly every sector of our productive activities (as imagined by the automation romances in terms of an object world of surface
media), but its replicability further depreciates (in the downwardly spiralling cheapness of the production of the copy) whatever commodity
value or profit margin inheres in any product. The latter, Baudrillardian depreciation arises from the unlimited dissemination effect of the
digital medium as supplement to our intentionally created content (as
imagined in the decentred values and identities of poststructuralist
romances). The net effect is to erode the commodity basis of the capitalist mode of production itself, and throw the value of all our labour time,
in work and play, into a maelstrom. Is this another romance?
For Davis and Stack, the most profound product of the new deep
medium is a crisis in unemployment and underemployment, as capitalism, through myriad last-ditch efforts, tries desperately to squeeze marginal values out of its own hyperproductive digital economy. This can
never be solved, they suggest, by strategies from the capitalist past, for
the social contracts that have always inhered between capital and
labour are in the digital age severed. An underclass is fated to grow in
214 Glenn Willmott
size and discontent, because the work that most people can do is no
longer valuable in the virtual factory and marketplace. The poor are
freed from commodified labour, and indeed from alienation as such.
This is a profound gain, perhaps, but must come at the cost of the social
wealth, which remains in the hands of the few still locked inside the
capitalist cage (who can perhaps fetishize, as in the white appropriation
of rap, the dispossessed creativity glimpsed without). On the other
hand, for these few themselves, the experience of virtual play on the
Internet, in the game world floats up like a mirror image of this real,
tragic freedom, even as it is recontained in the commodity form of specialized leisure products. For the leisure time of the virtual reality (VR)
user is, as has often been pointed out, dependent on the devalued work
time of an underclass. Behind every screen is a sweatshop. The homeless kid roams the pavement while the computer kid surfs the Web, the
dialectical twins of a new age. Not the digital user but the underclass is
the real, if immiserated, subject of the new economy. The userclass
knows its uncanny kinship, and wears the digital nomad like a second
skin, a tattoo.
The digital revolution is not, therefore, a merely technological one,
because the distribution of wealth can be unfair under any conditions.
Digitization can only create the situation wherein a human revolution
can begin, whereby production may be seized in the name of new values because, unlike in the past, its technology has exhausted one system of value creation and opened up the possibility of another.
Centrally, the value of labour time the sheer temporality of human
effort in production that is shucked off by the new commodity is
ready for new energies to inhabit and expand, without any common
principle of organization, without a negotiated plan.
Bungled Time
These are precisely the new digital media parameters explored by Stanley Kim Robinsons epic novels of the civilization of Mars: the power of
digitized analysis, production, and automation is there complete, and
all that is left is to create a human world in which this power is justly
distributed with revolution.6 But the new temporality is also curiously thematized. The twenty-four-hour Earth clock keeps on ticking,
but an extra fifty-some minutes spills open at midnight, when the
clocks stand still and time is set free to signify the difference of the
Martian day.
215
The best way of grasping the implications of the digital revolution,

therefore, is as the opening up of this radically different and subversive
valuation of time. If everyday time was once metered on the inescapable clock of commodity production a clock now stuttering and
wheezing (as Dostoevskys Underground Man first heard it) then our
time is henceforth transvalued, non-uniform, and in the systemic sense,
chaotic. We can already experience this new temporality directly in any
work which interfaces the dizzying registers of financial markets, or
paradigmatically, in any electronic play which interfaces the shapeshifting registers of VR. But most of us feel it indirectly, in the new sense
of radical mutability, of instability, in the world of institutions, demographies, jobs, and conflicts in which we are ineluctably, digitally implicated. In modern times, it was the outsider like Camus or Beckett
who felt, in the force of a revelation alien to his or her clockbound
milieu, that time was absurd. Now it is the insider, the citizen and consumer, unemployed or working overtime, who embraces it as clich.
We are liberated to enact equally fantasies of utopia and fantasies of terror (and condemned to be acted upon by them), without regarding
either as unreal or beyond what seems the normal progress of history.
Take Mr Bungle. He and his crime are an exemplary expression of
this dialectically ambivalent new mode of production in the aesthetic
sphere. He was a persona in the leisure-time VR system called LambdaMOO, and he deserves to be remembered in a pantheon of original,
mythic VR types. I learned his story from Julian Dibbell, the Village
Voice cyberspace writer who in 1993 (in a decade that may now be considered the archaic period of popular VR space, in which the complexities of subsequent developments writ themselves large in a simpler,
more heroized and demonized, less mundane digital world) witnessed
some of the events and wrote them up.7 MOO stands for MUD (MultiUser Domain)Object-Oriented, to distinguish its all-textual format
from VRs that include images and/or sounds. This one is a software
product stored on a Xerox Corporation computer that allows multiple
users from anywhere in the world to interact with the object world of
an architecturally mimetic, fantasy chateau and with each other in real
time (so they can do things in and to the rooms and corridors of the chateau, and interact gesturally and verbally with each other, in a virtual
time very close to real time). The utopian experience of a VR is obvious
in LambdaMOO: the world is there for the user, who can invent any
persona he or she likes, having any physical or emotional characteristics, and indulge both in realistic action and conversation and in the cre-
216 Glenn Willmott
ation of fantasy objects and situations. It is very like a nostalgic vision

of community. Strangers talk to you and take an interest in you, as a
rule rather than the exception. There is no work. Rather, there is no
need to work, because there is no need (as in classical cinema, the
bodily routines of needful labouring, eating, expelling, etc. only appear
when they belong to the plot of desire, to the symbolic order), and no
scarcity (for example, you can create a personal room of infinite dimensions). All this is even more emphatic in the commercial-product MUD
called There (at http://www.there.com), whose welcome pages look
like travel brochures advertising the social opportunities and leisure
activities one associates with a luxury cruise.
But from another perspective, everything is work: the user is
engaged in a continual activity of production. The work of creating a
persona, of interacting with others, and of making objects like clothing,
tools, or gifts indeed, the work of doing whatever is done in VR is
work in the realm of play, or a kind of play whose pleasure and ends are
in the creation and re-creation of the self and its social and physical
environment. This is nothing less than the reproduction of life, the
domain of work translated to the VR world. It feels like play and may
even confuse itself with the formal playfulness of art because just like
the work imagined in William Morriss aesthetic utopia News from
Nowhere it is work free of alienation (within VR); it is not sold to anyone under any system of surplus value (i.e., commodification, which if
Davis and Stack are right, could not be sustained even if itself created in
VR). The experience of time, therefore, is the experience of creativity
without the alienation of an object world, and social world, that disowns the producer. In a radical sense, ones time is ones own. The user
loses track of time because the fullness of time presents itself.
This alternative time sense may be felt, paradoxically, even in those
MUDs that impose strict limits on time and agency, such as the noncommercial version of There developed in 2003-4 for American military
training, which simulates an urban terrorist conflict zone under military authority. Need, scarcity, and death are no longer absurd, as they
were for a Catch-22 or M.A.S.H. generation, but subsumed into play
rather than productivity, process rather than product. In a VR world in
which why are we here? has no meaning apart from the will and
agency of the player seated before the screen, such ironies are obsolete.
Despite its attempt at VR realism, indeed, a soldier at the first military
test drive of this MUD responded: Cool ... Its like The Matrix. One
reason such realism dissolves into a more utopian time sense is that
217
even in the military There, there is no boredom. Boredom is a key part

of training, another soldier reported, since part of the challenge of gun
battles is that they often come out of nowhere after hours of tedium.8 In
real-life (RL) boredom, you have nothing to do; the world goes on without your work or your play. But the premise of the VR screen is that you
always have something to do. It is a silent contract between the screen
and the player. The VR world is a totally possessed, creative world, a
holistic field of action in which the player, like the hero of Northrop
Fryes notion of romance, is an intrinsic part. There is no room for alienation even in this community, then, whose realist war zone is the occasion for an ecstatic expenditure of individual will in a utopian world in
which even death is created, and makes perfect sense.
How then to explain Mr Bungle, a persona who evidently failed to
appreciate what Dibbell called the milder communal spirit of LambdaMOO,9 when Mr Bungle used it serially to rape other personas until
restrained, tried by an ad-hoc court, and destroyed by a Xerox arbitrator? In the surreal world of VR, Mr Bungle presented himself to his fellow users as a grotesque, misogynist clown. His crime was to force the
personas of other users into abusive or violent sexual acts with a voodoo doll. In some respects, this was merely an importation of the antisocial fantasy life of other VR systems (such as games) into a more
neutral and creative environment. It differs in the non-compliance,
hence virtual rape, of other users. Dibbell sees in the profound feelings
of violation and subsequent political will of the LambdaMOO users a
revelation of the indistinction, in VR, of word and act, of symbol and
reality. It is a quality as dangerous as it is utopian that he sees in the digital world reaching far beyond LambdaMOO and beneath us.
Yet I am inclined to believe that if Mr Bungle contradicts the essence
of LambdaMOOs VR, it may just as likely be due to LambdaMOOs
own contradiction as VR with actual power structures and alienated
social relations, and their sexist codings, in RL whence Mr Bungle
ultimately comes. I have suggested the digital utopian register of
MUDs like LambdaMOO: it is free of the structural alienation of self
and degradation of time that so constrains our productivity in the real
world. But this is only true in VR. It may offer a virtual disalienation
experienced in a virtual time, but the VR system is itself a materially
and institutionally bounded form of alienation, as Sean Cubitt has
argued.10 It is thus paradoxical, an alienated disalienation, an actual
utopia that depends on escape from (and within) rather than revolution of existing social relations. Mr Bungles violence, from this van-
218 Glenn Willmott
tage point, reveals itself to be violence directed toward VR itself, for not
being real (enough) that is, violence directed toward VR as a real
product, and its personas as the productions of real people. Hence Mr
Bungles desire, not to indulge fantasy violence in a VR game with
merely VR characters (like a video game), but to strike out at fellow VR
users themselves, through their created personas, and specifically at
the illusion of power (the users as their own producers, rather than the
interfering Mr Bungle, i.e., modern economy) of VR. Mr Bungles voodoo dolls actions may thus be read as overdetermined performances of
alienation both for Mr Bungle (as doll) and his victims (ventriloquized). It is this violating appropriation of others work of creation,
rather than the imaginary abuse alone which doubles it in content, that
is so horrifying, and so uncanny. For VR, Mr Bungle is the return of the
repressed.
Gates in Time
Mr Bungles story expresses in digital aesthetics the archaic tragic structure as opposed to romance of the digital revolution. If Mr Bungle is
a kind of sadomasochistic double of the repression of the real in VR, he
is from this perspective akin to the normal user, even as he is from
another, a deviant a kind of structural fate or revenge. For his readers,
the suffering inflicted by his virtual crimes is not simply evil, but revelatory and, as Dibbell says in his title, productive of a new kind of community. This is digital tragedy.11 Does the tragedy belong to life or to
art? Is the virtual communitys ongoing re-creation of itself through
narrative text an art or everyday life? The shifting ontologies of VR and
RL make these questions difficult to answer. If MUDs are a sign of
things to come, these questions point to the end of art as mastery of
form in commodifiable space and to its rebirth as mastery of initializations in a postcommodity flux, of the gateways in what Lord and
Marchessault call our fluid screens.
For the artist in a VR community like LambdaMOO or There can only
be identified by productions (narrative actions, object creations) that
stand apart by initiating or diverting the flow, by producing new gates
which send the digital user toward the unseen creative depths, limits,
and possibilities of the virtual medium. The programmer who creates
or alters the software foundation of a MUD is thus engaging in artistic
production, just as any user is who, like Mr Bungle, sets new parameters for self and community reproduction in VR. Of course, while Mr
219
Bungles user, and perhaps the VR programmer, merely indulge in fantasy or dream creation along with the culture industry at large (Cubitt
has said that MOOs articulate an infantile maternal world),12 the work
of the artist will always be what T.S. Eliot called disciplined dreaming:
play grasped precisely as work, in the symbolic rather than imaginary
orders. For the digital artist, immersed in the flow of the deep medium,
producing new origins and parameters from within, rather than
expressive forms from without, a tragic embrace of the suffering-liberating ambivalence of the digital revolution is unavoidable.
The form of the virtual work of art is contingent not only on its media
and mediation but on the past and future work of others; it finds completion as product in the propagation of work beyond it. For this reason
the VR community is not just one digital product among others, nor
simply the dialectical antithesis of a real-life digital society described
above. The VR community is the tendential product of any radical or
fully immersed digital art. This is most readily seen in digital art created in interactive surface media, as in interactive installations and
Internet programs. But it is also echoed in spectator surface media, such
as digital theatre, video, and cinema.
Interactive Spectacle
Peter Lunenfeld describes the CD-ROM installation work created by
Graham Harwood, A Rehearsal of Memory, as just such a tragic gate:
Harwood went to Ashworth Mental Hospital in Liverpool, where he
recorded the thoughts and memories of the inmates ... [He] scanned the
inmates bodies, stored them in memory (note that Rehearsal of Memory
abbreviates as ROM), radically modified the raw images, and created a
series of composite naked figures to form the ground for his interactive
work. Using a mouse, users scroll across Harwoods patchwork prisoners.
As they pass over this fleshy sea of scars and tattoos, users trigger memories: with sounds from the hospital resonating in the background, the
patients offer anecdotes about their crimes and sufferings.13
By digitizing the bodies and memories of mental institution patients,

the artist here creates the parameters for a virtual narrative activated by
the user. While Lunenfeld finds the work suffers from a romanticism
and sentimentalism regarding the violent and mad (no doubt with Foucault in mind), this may put too much emphasis on the content as
220 Glenn Willmott
opposed to the medium and form. The surface technology employed

here uncannily duplicates the medical technology of diagnosis and
monitoring familiar to hospital rooms and operating theatres. The user
is invited to probe the tattoos and scars of the virtual body just as a doctor examines it for signs and symptoms. Hence a kind of performance
of real work takes place in order to generate the work of art, which
must therefore be grasped precisely as work on the part of the user. This
physical and imaginative sensation of work is counterposed to the virtual traces, somatic and psychic, of bodies severed from work, from the
ability to work productively in society: the insane who, like the growing dispossessed, are free from one kind of work (as alienation) but
deprived of another (as reproduction of social wealth). If it were the
memory of the mad and violent which needed to be rehearsed by
users of Harwoods digital machinery, it would indeed signify a Foucauldian romanticism deserving of Lunenfelds hesitations. But clearly
it is the memory of the user that is called to rehearsal, the user trying to
forget the tightrope that body and mind must walk between digital
value and worthlessness, between digital society and exclusion,
between digital misery and paradise.
The virtual community implied by A Rehearsal of Memory is not that
of the inmates (whose real community the individual bodies and
devalued productivity the stories have been dissolved and recomposed in a fleshy sea sutured together by institutional noise, and so
become parameters for virtual community production at another level),
but of its serial users, all those able to emulate and navigate the VR of
the doctors work. Linked thus to the work of others, both of the
inmates and the users, both virtual and real, the individual user necessarily works on his or her own memory, somatic and cognitive, to produce a new narrative flow. The beauty and magic of the point-andclick, virtual narrative is married to the inhospitability of its intimate,
real depths.
Need tragedy be so dark? The suffering of tragedy was by Nietzsche
paradoxically identified as having a common basis in flux and transvaluation with the pleasure of play. This kind of tragic play may be
felt in the ecstatic narratives flowed by children through the gate work
of Japanese artist Toshio Iwai. For example, Iwai created an interactive
VR television program for children users, Ugo Ugo Lhuga, in whose
Voice Sumo segment individual users drawings of creatures of their
own imaginings, mailed in on postcards, were digitized and engaged in
virtual sumo bouts onscreen.14 The outcome of the combat would
221
depend on the audience of users telephoning in their support with

shouts, in real time, for one creature or the other; the loudest side winning. The elegance of this interactive work is its integration of individual creative work with collective interaction (a characteristic of Iwais
work generally) and the brilliant re-appropriation by the child artist of
commodity products and the commodified work stored in them and in
their value (rather like do-it-yourself Pokmon monsters). The agon,
the ritual combat which is the purified basis of the work, will doubtless
recall the shadowy nature of Mr Bungles appearance in VR. But where
the tragedy of real-life digitization is channelled in Harwoods work
through the insane as a socially unproductive (or improperly productive) body, the same body in Iwais work belongs to children. The VR
community of children users is invited to participate in a festival of
destruction, but contrary to Mr Bungles example, their productions
affirm and reinforce rather than appropriate the creative work of
others. The result is perhaps the closest thing to a Dionysian celebration
of the terrible and violent ephemerality yet overriding and ecstatic
creativity of self and mastery as spectacle that art has offered to
Nietzsches future.15
When we understand tragedy, says Nietzsche, we understand the
meaning of our desire to look, and yet to long to go beyond looking,
and recognize a Dionysiac phenomenon, one which reveals to us the
playful construction and demolition of the world of individuality as an
outpouring of primal pleasure and delight, a process quite similar to
Heraclitus the Obscures comparison of the force that shapes the world
to a playing child who sets down stones here, there, and the next place,
and who builds up piles of sand only to knock them down again.16
Spectacular Interaction
While interactive media works may seem uniquely able to represent, in
the still barely recognized forms of aesthetic gateways, the anatomy of
the digital revolution, it must be remembered that even these as I
asserted in the case of LambdaMOO produce VR communities that
are relatively contained systems proper to the leisure worlds of art and
recreation. At this level they are spectacles, with a measure of safe
voyeurism, just like theatre and cinema. Conversely, art in these latter
media need not be any less authentic in its emulation of the digital
world.
Chris Markers film Level Five (1996) uses digital cinema technology
222 Glenn Willmott
in both form and content. It alternates between two spaces, real and
virtual: the real concerns a woman searching the computer memory of
a vanished friend, never seen in the film; the virtual concerns the history of the Japanese island of Okinawa during the Second World War,
which is digitized in the friends computer memory, at a hidden depth
of digital architecture cryptically coded level 5. The VR community
explored by the film is twofold, since both the relationship between
the missing friends (the communication between their very souls) is
now in VR, and on a larger scale, the relationship between the French
present and the Japanese past (the communication of history as social
memory) is also in VR. The one VR is allegorical of the other. The personal and the public are alike digitized communities, each confronting
the recognition of hardly representable suffering and the creative value
of survival.
The gates in Level Five are the characters that is, there are no characters. There are only text and image traces that function as somatic and
cognitive gates, allowing memory to flow without pooling or stabilizing in any character (woman or man) or setting (Paris or Okinawa, past
or present). The digital production is not technological, then, for either
of these VR communities. It is insistently intersubjective, dependent on
the navigations of the user the woman or the cinematic audience. For
the woman user represented in the film, who navigates in this way, this
kind of work is bewildering enough. For the passive user of Markers
digital cinema, who must develop an imaginary identification with this
work in VR but cannot navigate it him or herself, the horror is twofold.
There is a sense of failed navigation or paralysis of memory viewing
the othered work of the film, ones own work excluded from it. This
effect of the organization, the parameters set in the organization of the
surface medium, fuses with the horror of failed navigation or paralysis
of history itself, (not resisting) the tragedy of Okinawa: (not viewing)
the work beyond the film. Like A Rehearsal of Memory, the work is a call
to remember oneself in digital flows into, out of, and apart from the
work of others.
Tragedy grasped as the double-edged, utopian and terrible, spectacle
of digital immersion in history is also witnessed in Daniel David
Mosess play of light across and through and in and out of the open
face of the planet, the stage drama Kyotopolis (1993).17 Here the digital
production using sound and video to create VR spaces and worlds
which interact with real ones evokes not the past, but the future, that
almost present dream of the city of tomorrow, which is the global
223
Indian village. Moses recasts the digitally transformed and interconnected world, foreseen by McLuhan, as the re-appropriated product of
Native history, and its real and virtual communities as the extended
relations of Native family. At the heart of the drama are three characters
more virtual than real: Babe Fisher, a little Indian girl who is the star of
a VR community of Little People mediated by television (but who is
now literally lost in space, her only trace the televised image of a rotating spacecraft, her face perhaps at the window); Tommy Hawk, an
Indian clown who is host of and presiding genius behind the Little
People TV program (a shape-shifter whose production studio is a Batcavesque hideout inside a Hawaiian volcano); and Mary Oh, a VR
media celebrity (and grown-up Little Person, who seeks the life story of
the orphan Babe). It is the latter plot, the utopian (because global village) identification of the non-Native with the Native character, and the
suffering she must confront and work through as she pushes this identification further into the truth of Babes life, that is central and the tragedy of Kyotopolis. In a word, as VR communities perform a (utopian)
reverse-assimilation of non-Native to Native life and history, RL society
persists in the (oppressive) appropriation of Native to non-Native prejudice and economy.
This dialectic is played out by Mary, who must ultimately confront
the (real) joyous, creative power of the digital trickster Tommy as well
as the (real) exploitation and misery of the virtual idol Babe. For Mary
and the other characters, and for us, Babes death is explicitly Christlike: she becomes the hurt and loss at the centre of things that allows
the characters to turn and talk to each other she becomes their part
real, part virtual, common ground. Near the end of the play, a cycle of
projected images appears in the chaotic wake of a butterfly:
The butterfly disappears into a shadow as the other pulsing places, the
projected petroglyphs and city and Milky Way, also return, in their
cycling, and the space station, Moon Two, rises above a clearing bank of
clouds. Its moon bright and large, a spectacle of rings and squares,
spheres and cubes a gigantic high technology astrolabe, a turning tesseract, a future spirit catcher.18
This repeats a cycle of images, creating a virtual path down which

Babe tries to dance, from the outset of the play except for the new element, here, of a transformed moon, at once digital life world and guidance machine, dreamed of by Babe and now realized. She required the
224 Glenn Willmott
words of the others to complete her own dream, and the work of the
others to complete her life. As a drum beats at the close of the play
each beat a pulse of energy, a digital unit of light in dark Babe finds
her steps and dances away on this path.
Zero Work
The digital world has produced its romances. McLuhans was perhaps
the first: the digital world as an apocalyptic good, an ultimate freedom
of the senses that is, the senses of that literally unlimited and indeterminate human community he called the global village to interact
totally and simultaneously. McLuhan imagined the totality of human
existence as a single, interconnected work of art which meant the final
ranging of forces of good and evil toward some unthinkable utopian or
dystopian future. But the romance of the digital has taken many forms
since: an enthusiasm for unregulated, public forums, or for interactive
play, as democratic ideals; or for the disruption of orthodox notions of
the text or the self in digitally structured communication. Of course,
everything we do in media as artists or otherwise has a value-laden
purpose, belongs to some romance, that someone some cybertopian
or cyberphobe might expose. What my digital sausages warn me is
that the digital is not one vehicle for such values or romances among
others. It is not one thing out there among other things, good or bad,
but is now everywhere, has all other media as its content. We consume
and incorporate it everywhere. Hence digitization is not something
new coming into the world to tip the balance toward good or evil. It is
the balance. It is beyond good and evil.
This is where the idea of digital art is most interesting not when it
purveys another romance to consume of the good, the democratic, the
liberating but when it (equally) astonishes us, in a manner seductive
or terrifying, by descending into the digital as mundane, as everyday,
as the ultimate technological exercise of power over time itself, as the
closest thing to the language of the will deployed across time, which
Nietzsche failed to dream of, except as music. Nietzsche thought of
music as the medium closest in form to the reality of power and historical time as an unpredictable, blithe, or turbulent rhythm. But what
Nietzsche really saw was not time, but the mastery of time as history
(but also the unmasterability of time as history) that music stood for
the barely imaginable, ultimate technical rhythm of human control over
nature and remastering of communication, the rhythm precisely of
225
smallest, virtual units in time, the rhythm of the digital. The digital is
Nietzsches true element willful yet mercurial, ephemeral yet consequential, seducing and flaming. It is worth trying to imagine what tragedy born not from the spirit of music, but from the spirit of digitization
would be like. It will not at present be sweetness and light; it may not be
recognizable as culture. It is always, already too degraded to be separated out as culture. It is always, already impertinently insisting upon
the mediating, artificial, commodifying rhythms of digital engines
chugging away beneath any message, any moment of time, any work of
art and its audience. We dont like to look at that, even as, with tragic
fascination, we do.
But digital tragedy is perhaps a way of thinking of degradation, of
the fate of media, as itself a creative process, with an immediacy that no
other media could have. That is, degradation, or digitization, is human,
is somehow and radically our own (not out there beyond us, as in market forces or new technologies, but within us, yours and mine). This
degradation must be thought of, as Sean Cubitt says of textual communication, as a kind of sociality degree zero, or social noise,19 in whose
digital form the terrible and seductive flux of time as history reveals
itself, but at least reveals itself in a virtual mirror of collective desire, as
a material, malleable, human thing. We must inhabit this zero that is no
longer void but has to be rethought as a kind of solidity: a break in the
flow that marks the negentropic intervention of intelligence, human or
technological, in the timeless time of the electromagnetic.20 We may
justly believe, therefore, in a utopian role for art today; but if it is to
come from digital art, it will perhaps have to come from this overcoming of time as masterful objectification and degradation, and release us
to new possibilities for, because also beyond, our sense of pleasure and
work alike.
NOTES
1 Sean Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics (London: Sage, 1998), 234.
2 A theoretical note on deep media: The cultures I list here are all multiple
media social formations encompassing a heterogeneous array of material
and institutional technologies, economic practices, and zones of sensory and
psychical experience. The concept of deep media is not totalizing but generalizing. A deep medium is pervasive enough to affect all other media
(including the negative effect of marginalization or transvaluation of media
226 Glenn Willmott
5
6
7
outside its realm) and the zones of experience they produce, while itself
remaining only sporadically or partially affected by other media. For example, digital technology has completely transformed personal written correspondence, but personal written correspondence cannot be imagined, in
similar proportion, to have transformed digital technology. For McLuhan,
media were not only ways of communicating but ways of knowing, feeling,
and making (of making things, or making things happen). As extensions of
ourselves, media translate us, create us, numb us, and excite us, in countless
specific and different ways. Even so, the deep media that I have called dominant in this regard, at the bedrock of culture, cannot be identified with what
Marxists have called modes of production. The latter term is a historicist one
that already signifies human power over what gets made for whom, and
why; it enfolds group values and decisions that are properly institutional.
Deep media may profoundly affect our subjective lives, but they are not
themselves other than objective processes. A mode of production is perhaps
best thought of as the intersection of human institutions which create, distribute, and adjudicate value, with a dominant or deep medium. Postmodern critics, both Marxist and non-Marxist, remind us that these institutions
are also multiple and irreducible to a total system, so that we speak of a
dominant institution such as contemporary capitalism as a mode of production in the understanding that we are speaking of a general condition rather
than a dystopian or utopian unity. In shorthand, it is now possible to identify social and economic institutions as modes of information, a dominant
mode of institutional formation as a mode of production, and the dominant
technology of interface or translation among institutions as a deep medium.
Jim Davis and Michael Stack, The Digital Advantage, in Cutting Edge: Technology, Information, Capitalism, and Social Revolution, ed. Jim Davis, Thomas
Hirschl, and Michael Stack (London: Verso, 1997), 12144.
Given current world population and pressure on resources, an end to scarcity is hardly imaginable, nor a struggle between classes for control of
them. Rather than posit a Marxian class revolution on the grounds of such
class struggle, Davis and Stack postulate (contra Marx) a redistribution of
wealth that should follow from the end of productions of surplus value,
hence the end of capital accumulation as such.
Davis and Stack, The Digital Advantage, 128.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Mars Trilogy, 3 vols (New York: Bantam, 19936).
Julian Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace; or How an Evil Clown, a Haitian
Trickster Spirit, Two Wizards, and a Cast of Dozens Turned a Database into
a Society, in High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace, ed. Peter Ludlow (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 37595.
227
8 Clive Thompson, The Making of an X-Box Warrior, New York Times Magazine, 22 August 2004, 35, 36.
9 Dibbell, A Rape in Cyberspace, 377.
10 Cubitt, Digital Aesthetics, 16.
11 I am drawing on Raymond Williamss notion of tragedy as a historical genre
in which disorder is suffered in order to reshape and renew a community
in short, for modernity, a viable aesthetic for revolution.
13 Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A Users Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
14 Toshio Iwai, Ugo Ugo Lhuga (Fuji Television, Japan, October 1992March
1994).
15 Whereas either pleasure or violence is an implicit, if powerful, register of
the tragic gateways digitized above, their complicity itself is the explicit
theme of recent cinematic works by David Cronenberg. Above all, Cronenbergs eXistenZ (1999), which is about a VR community interacting in a
three-dimensional game world, explores at the level of digital surface media
the repetitive compulsive seduction and destruction plots that overtake
users personas and relationships as they lose the ability to distinguish
between VR and RL. Cronenbergs films, however, perhaps tend toward
dystopia more than tragedy; even the most seductive of his works, M Butterfly (1993), is by virtue of its political and betrayal plots, tinged with the
same cynical horizon.
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald
Speirs, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge
17 Daniel David Moses, Kyotopolis (Toronto: Playwrights Union of Canada,
1993).
18 Ibid., 91.
20 Sean Cubitt, Good Vibrations: Time as Special Effect, abstract published in
the program for Images: The 13th Annual Images Festival of Independent
Film and Video (Toronto, 1322 April 2000). A revised version of the talk
may be found at http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/staffpages/sean/
as.html.
PART III
Liquid Space Mobility
The final section of Fluid Screens seeks to understand the social, economic, and material structures of screen technologies in terms of the
mobility of cultures and people. The first essay in this section provides
a chilling and detailed reading of the military entertainment complex
and the aesthetic/anaesthetic tension of its users. This materiality of the
circuitry of media production, distribution, and reception is considered
throughout the essays in this section by an emphasis on aesthetic phenomena. This section connects analyses of media industries with the
liquidity of capital in terms of labour practices within a Canadian film
and television industry context. The specific responses to this condition
include the use of digital media, such as cell phones, to animate protest
and expand the theatre of the public. The section ends with two analyses that focus on efforts to intervene in and redirect the flow of information and power through the specificity of citizenship in global contexts
and through the processes and connectivity of a digital aesthetics of the
committed artwork.
12 Armed Vision and the Banalization of War:

Full Spectrum Warrior
ni ck dy e r- w ith efo r d a n d gr ei g de peuter
Games of Empire
Video and computer games are exemplary media of contemporary
empire. Just as the eighteenth-century novel was a textual machine creating the bourgeois subjectivities requisite to an emergent capitalism,
and as television and film were media vital to twentieth-century Fordism, today digital play a global industry whose revenues exceed those
of the Hollywood box office is a constituent component of both planetary hyper-capitalism and of insurgencies against it. And nothing is
more central to games or empire than war. In this essay, we briefly
review the historical relationship between military simulation and digital play, and then focus on one instance of this connection Full Spectrum Warrior, a dual-purpose simulation designed both as a training aid
for the U.S. army and as a commercial game. Such games are among the
visualization and virtualization technologies of what Jordan Crandall
calls armed vision, which, he argues, are essential to new global complexes of military power.1 In their crossover of combat training and
popular entertainment, digital war games are a major site of the banalization of war that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe as necessary for habituating imperial biopower to perpetual conflict.2
MIMENET and the Institute for Creative Technologies
Several recent studies of the military-entertainment complex, militainment, or what James Der Derian calls MIMENET (the militaryindustrial-media-entertainment network), have delineated the shared
genealogies of digital play and military simulation.3 At first, the domi-
232 Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter
nant partner was the U.S. national security state. Pentagon funding
supported the computer laboratories where Spacewar and other protogames were created in the 1960s.4 By the 1990s, however, postCold
War military budgets were declining, while commercial games had
advanced so fast as to be superior to the Pentagons in-house simulations. A newly frugal military began to adopt or adapt civilian games
for training purposes.
9/11 gave this rapprochement a massive boost. U.S. military budgets shot back near to Cold War levels, but alliances between games
companies and armed forces did not disappear. On the contrary. The
military poured funds into co-designed simulations to anticipate the
new challenge of the war on terror. Developers rushed to capitalize on
market opportunities created by media coverage of terrorism and the
invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq: Sony infamously attempted to copyright the slogan Shock and Awe. War game sales rocketed, and collaboration with the military gave such products the cachet of authenticity
that console-warriors craved.
Some instances pushed the intersection of virtual and actual war to
the extreme. One was the U.S. Armys widely discussed online computer game Americas Army, launched in 2002 to recruit young Americans with no experiential connection to war, but plenty to video games.
Another, starting from a commercial basis, was Kuma Reality Games, an
online gaming service launched in 2004, whose website reports the war
on terror in a format mimicking CNN or Fox, and then invites paying
subscribers to re-live an event in the form of playable missions an
attack on Al Qaeda in the Afghan mountains, the capture of Saddam
Hussein, or the assault on Fallujah: Wherever the war takes our forces,
well put you there.5 While Americas Army and Kuma Reality received
most attention in the mainstream press, militarygame industry
overlaps were ubiquitous. The Department of Defense Game Development Community, a network aiming to connect the entire community
developing games within the US military and supported by DARPA
(Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), currently lists some
forty games custom made for military purposes, about twenty-five
off-the-shelf products considered useful, as well as several mods, or
game modifications.6
Even in this crowded field, however, the Institute for Creative Technologies (ICT) occupies a special place. ICT epitomizes the intersection
of military planning, computer simulation, film studios, and video
game developers in what Der Derian terms a new configuration of vir-
233
tual power.7 Based at the University of Southern California, it was created in 1999 by the army and funded to the tune of $45 million to tap
into the entertainment industrys high-tech expertise. A senior official,
Michael Macedonia, describes its goal as to produce a revolution in
how the military trains and rehearses for upcoming missions by
develop[ing] the art and technology for synthetic experiences to a
pitch so compelling that participants will react as if they are real, thus
providing a quantum leap in helping the army prepare for the world,
soldier, organization, weaponry, and mission of the future.8 The ICT
hired talent from game companies and film studios to collaborate in
this mission: the artists who designed the special effects for The Matrix
and Total Recall, screenwriters for films such as Training Day and The
Fast and the Furious, a designer from the Alien movies. The deal was
clear: the military got sophisticated training aids for its soldiers, entertainment companies got insider military knowledge and products to
sell.
ICT creations include simulations with branching storylines to train
U.S. officers negotiating with Afghan warlords; compelling filmed
case studies of interpersonal military leadership issues; investigations of neurobiological discoveries linking affect to learning, aimed at
harnessing emotional valiance and training retention; anticipatory
visualizations of future war, such as the award-winning film Nowhere to
Hide, a sweeping vision of the Armys Future Force in action depicting
vertical envelopment conducted against a fleeing asymmetric enemy;
FlatWorld, which allows users to experience virtual worlds say a
Baghdad street corner under enemy fire without wearing clunky goggles; and the Sensory Environments Evaluation program (SEE), an
immersive virtual-reality tunnel that can re-create unpleasant environments such as abandoned bunkers filled with bats with astonishing verisimilitude. The aim, according to one ICT spokesperson, is to
create veterans whove never seen combat.9 Not the least of ICT progeny are a series of game-like training simulations: Full Spectrum Commander, Full Spectrum Leader, and Full Spectrum Warrior. To understand
these titles requires a short excursion into military doctrine.
Full-Spectrum Dominance
Full-spectrum dominance is a concept whose centrality to Pentagon
thinking was announced in Joint Vision 2020, a planning document
released in 2000 by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Its opening page declares
the U.S. military aim over the next two decades to be the creation of a
force that is dominant across the full spectrum of military operations
persuasive in peace, decisive in war, preeminent in any form of conflict.10 Joint Vision goes on:
The label full spectrum dominance implies that US forces are able to conduct prompt, sustained, and synchronized operations with combinations
of forces tailored to specific situations and with access to and freedom to
operate in all domains space, sea, land, air, and information.11
Additionally, given the global nature of our interests and obligations,

full-spectrum dominance requires that the United States maintain its
overseas presence forces and the ability to rapidly project power worldwide.12 So full-spectrum designates military force that can flexibly
modulate its activities across different types and theatres of operations,
scaling its responses up and down as its goals and circumstances
require, shifting seamlessly, from, say, tactical nuclear options to guerrilla war, with planetary reach.13
The possibility of full-spectrum dominance is in turn given by the
Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a transformation in military
practices occasioned by the shift from industrial to informational
warfare. The possession of overwhelming strategic, operational, and
tactical advantage is determined by superiority in high technology,
especially in communications and computing, rather than quantities of
manpower or even equipment. RMA identifies a situation of virtual
war, fought out onscreen, in which the enemy becomes visible, knowable, and destroyable through the mediation digital technologies, from
satellite-generated maps to heads-up display systems, and computercontrolled and dispatched weaponry.
What causes greatest disquiet to U.S. planners, however, is the threat
of low-tech opponents and asymmetrical conflict. The NATO and Red
Army forces that faced each other in the Cold War were symmetrical
enemies, mirror-images, each with missiles, tanks, artillery, air and
infantry, and tactical and operational doctrines that fell broadly within
the same plane of military logic. But the U.S. troops fighting Iraq or
Afghanistan face asymmetrical foes: insurgents massively outgunned
in terms of high-technology firepower, far less well trained, but retaliating with practices, such as suicide bombing, assassinations of civilian
collaborators, and other forms of terrorism that seem, to imperial eyes,
alien, uncivilized, and inhuman. Joint Vision 2020 identifies such asym-
235
metric approaches as perhaps the most serious danger the United

States faces in the immediate future.14
Associated with asymmetric conflicts is yet another acronym:
MOUT (Military Operations in Urban Terrain). As Mike Davis has
noted, Pentagon strategists consider the Third World city to be the key
battlespace of the future.15 The view that the slum has become the
weakest link in the American empire is based not only on the disasters
that befell U.S. occupations of Mogadishu and Beirut, but also on
Israeli experiences in Gaza and the West Bank. If the future of warfare
... lies in the streets, sewers, high-rise buildings, and sprawl of houses
that form the broken cities of the world, special training is required for
the soldiers who will fight in such conditions.16 MOUT tactics are
applied on a daily basis in cities such as Baghdad, Fallujah, and Nadjaf.
Preparation for such fighting involves incessant war games, physical
and virtual.17
ICTs full-spectrum simulations are part of these rehearsals. All are
onscreen, digital trainers, modelling asymmetric combat: Full Spectrum
Command aims to train company-level leaders, in charge of about 120
men; Full Spectrum Leader works at the level of thirty-men platoons. Full
Spectrum Warrior (FSW) deals with very small-scale squad-level operations: the army intends it not to train officers but to help soldiers understand what their leaders are asking them to do: By taking the bosss
job, Soldiers might deepen their appreciation for the correct execution
of dismounted battle drills in the urban context.18 What really distinguishes FSW, however, is that it is a militarycivilian co-development
with two versions. The military version teaches soldiers how to make
smart decisions in the nightmare of urban combat. The civilian version,
released in 2003, makes this an entertainment experience.
Under the auspices of ICT, Pandemic Studios developed both versions, with Sony Pictures Imageworks doing special effects. The giant
game publisher THQ Inc. later prepared the game for commercial sale.
Civilian and military versions alike are playable on Microsofts Xbox,
with the commercial version later being ported to the PC and PS2. From
the armys point of view, leveraging Xbox capabilities saved on special simulation devices, and capitalized on young recruits familiarity
with game consoles, creating a potential efficiency in training for
training.19 The army invested $5 million. Pandemic and Sony did the
development, promising $2.6 million worth of in-kind work. In return,
they got the rights to the commercial game. It is with this entertainment
version of FSW that we begin.
Mission to Zekistan
Turn on your console, load FSW; skip the manual, the tutorials, and the
introductory video; jump directly to the first mission. Here is the
dusty, deserted, sinister Middle Eastern town, with its labyrinth of
winding streets. Here we are, your point of view embedded in the
midst of a U.S. infantry squad. Already barely visible enemies have
opened fire from ambush; in front of you, a truck burns; its driver lies
wounded; automatic weapons chatter; distant explosions reverberate.
You are a soldier-subject in the war on terror: kill or be killed.
And this is all you really need to know. After a few mission failures
you may return to the tutorials, or the manual. There you find the backstory. Zekistan is an imaginary Central Asian country with a three
thousand year history punctuated by violence and bloodshed. After
guerrilla struggle against Soviet invasion comes a civil war in which
Mhujadeen fighters led by the charismatic Mohammed Jabbour Al
Afad emerge supreme. Afads regime converts the country to fundamentalist worship and persecutes the ethnic Zekis, the nomadic
mountain people that had originally settled the region, practising
genocide and forced sterilization. Thousands of ex-Taliban and Iraqi
loyalists set up terrorist-training facilities and death camps. Following a devastating wave of terrorist attacks across Europe and South
East Asia, U.S. intelligence tracks the source to Zekistan. After
repeated warnings and failed diplomatic resolutions in the UN, NATO
votes to invade. Massive air strikes prepare the ground for infantry and
armour to begin the land war which is where you, the virtual warrior
suddenly inserted beside a burning truck on a dirty street, come in.20
This is a complex geopolitical story. But it is basically irrelevant. All
the parts are familiar from innumerable CNN reports, news photos,
and movies: the political premises, the allotted roles, and the desired
outcome predictable. In a prophetic essay, Requiem for Our Prospective Dead, written at the time of the first Gulf War, Brian Massumi
observes how, in a situation where war and nonwar was getting harder
and harder to tell apart, the legitimation of state violence operates primarily in an affective register, through the mass media. This affective
circulation depends on a series of conversions, elisions, and blurs. On
the one hand, the enemy combines attributes of military opponent, despot, terrorist, thug, genocide perpetrator omni-purpose evil. On the
other, there is an implied identification between U.S. soldiers, media
audiences, and foreign populations supposedly being philanthropi-
237
cally aided by our side. As Massumi puts it, All you need do is feel
a oneness with the prospective dead hero, and, based on that, hostility
for the hypothetical enemy.21
Such is the universe of FSW. Zekistan is Iraq, Afghanistan, and Kosovo; Al Afad, bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, and Milosevic; his Zekistan
Liberation Front are composite tyrannical, ethnic-cleansing, weaponscaching terrorist malefactors. You, the player, are our troops, at once
defending the homeland and liberating oppressed inhabitants of
invaded countries. One of the U.S. soldiers whose position the player
adopts displays on his helmet the letters NYPD: New York Police
Department. U.S. soldiers in Central Asia are planetary police. In a
moment of scripted dialogue, after a ferocious firefight has left bodies
strewn all across the streets, one of our infantrymen reflects aloud: I
think just by being here we help.
First-Person Thinker
The virtual experience of FSW is that of commanding two four-person
teams of U.S. infantry: Alpha and Bravo. The players point of view is
normally from behind the shoulder of the sergeant commanding a
team. He voices orders entered by the player on the console pad or
computer keyboard Bravo, pay attention! Move! which are then
executed by the fire team as a group. But the players in-game subjectposition is more complex than it first appears. One can switch from
leader of Alpha to that of Bravo, and back again. Indeed, one can see
from the position of any member of the team if it is necessary to get a
specific line of sight on an enemy position. Even if a sergeant is hit, his
team continues to operate and can carry him to medical aid. So it could
be said that the players implied position is that of a ninth officer,
invisible and invulnerable, commanding both fire teams (and indeed in
the military version this figure is included, and can move between
Alpha and Bravo). But even this officer could not see from all the perspectives available to the player. Ultimately, the player of FSW has a
trans-individual position, as the consciousness of a collective entity.
The protagonists are Alpha and Bravo, a military team experienced as
microcosmic group mind.
The player must complete a series of increasingly challenging missions. Alpha and Bravo clear streets, evacuate wounded, relieve surrounded comrades, discover mass graves, eliminate anti-tank weapons
halting U.S. armour, call in air strikes on enemy vehicles, fight their
way through a palace, a university, and an oil refinery, rescue captured

aircrews, and eventually unearth Al Jafad himself. And all this,
according to the in-game clock, happens on 24/09/2004. Its a busy day.
The necessary skills are rapidly learned in the in-game MOUT Training Course. There are two types of commands: fire and movement. Fire
commands select weaponry, targets, and the intensity of fire: point fire
takes out specific targets, suppression fire unleashes a maximum volume of bullets compelling foes to keep their heads down or die. Movement commands direct the team to its next location, with the cursor
showing exactly where each member will end up; teams can rush,
moving with maximum speed, or bound, advancing cautiously keeping weapons trained where enemies may appear.
The player, as squad leader, doesnt directly fire weapons, but rather
orders others to do so. The art of the game is the balance of fire and
movement; the rapid detection of enemies; the location of covered positions with commanding fields of fire; and the interplay of support
between the two squads, manoeuvring one so that it can cover the
others assault, all while managing ammunition supplies and navigating through a city. The process is remarkably cerebral, geometric,
almost chess-like. Contrasting FSW with conventional first-person
shooters games, Michael Macedonia calls it a first-person thinker.22
Alpha, Bravo, and the Tangos
But FSW has its affective dimensions. It goes to some lengths to personalize the members of Alpha and Bravo, whose backgrounds are
described in detail in the game manual and, in the Xbox version, in
introductory scenes. Thus of Sergeant Santiago Garcia Mendez we
learn that he is a first generation American, born to Cuban immigrants who instilled his strong work ethic and drive to better himself
and his community and that he is a fiercely protective and loving
father, a trait which comes through in dealing with his squad.23 Cpl.
Andre Ellis Devreux (Crawdaddy) is an African American who had a
typical suburban middle class upbringing, complete with little league,
summer camp and a trip to Orlando, Florida when he was ten. That
was the summer before he lost his mother to cancer. Nova Picoli
grew up in a crowded household with four older sisters and joined
the army to escape debt, and Private Gidget Ota is the middle child of
a single working mother in Honolulu. In a bow to Middle Eastern
amity, the squad includes both Arab-American Private Asher Shehadi
239
Ali (although he finds aspects of his parents culture fascinating and

takes pride in his heritage, he is also a proud American and considers
himself no different from any other Southern California guy), and the
Caucasian, but clearly Jewish, Private Philly Alexander Isaac Silverman, is Alpha teams resident smart ass.
One of the games main tropes is thus that of Band of Brothers,
familiar in war movies. In their mix of ethnicities and classes, Alpha
and Bravo are an equal-opportunity paradigm. Of their eight members,
three are Caucasian, two black, one Arab, and one Polynesian. There
are four high school diploma holders, one graduate from university
(pre-law), two from college, and one from police academy. Though programmatic in its inclusiveness, this is actually a semi-plausible representation of a combat squad in the contemporary professional army,
which is in essence a working class military, enlisted from people who
are upwardly mobile but from families without the resources to send
them to college. With minorities overrepresented and the wealthy and
underclass essentially absent, its composition resembles that of a two
year commuter or trade school outside Birmingham or Biloxi.24 Alpha
and Bravo are somewhat better educated, and more ethnically diverse,
than the statistical norm, but not unbelievable.
This militarized multiculturalism is explicitly thematized in the
game. At the end of one mission, there is a cut scene where one of the
white soldiers tries out some hip-hop rhyme. You are not, nor ever
have been, black remarks one of his Afro-American team. Blackness is
a state of mind, brother, he retorts. Sergeant Mendez then intervenes
with a proper assertion of uniformed race-blindness: Theres only one
colour in this army, green. Philly Silverman pipes up, With respect
sir, I think thats brown presumably referring to the actual colours of
camouflage battle gear. Yo, shit brown, quips another black trooper. In
the imperial army, race and class antagonisms are subsumed, not only
in the common uniform, but also in the shared, shitty grittiness of soldierly life.
The buddy ethos is sustained throughout the gameplay. When a
squad member is hit, his team members cry, They got Philly! (or
Mendes, or whoever). Soldiers comment on the heat: I wish I had a
pop, nice and cold; the pathos of war: It doesnt have to be this way;
inactivity: Nothin wrong with chillin for a while, I suppose; and
become agitated if exposed to fire without cover: I thought standing
out in the open was pretty much what they told us not to do! Remarks
range from the salacious: You should see my wife in the morning, just
after she gets out of the shower; the properly domestic: Should be a
letter waiting for you from your family; the derogatory: This place
sure is fucked up in all kinds of ways; and the virtually self-reflexive:
When we get back to base, Im going to whip your ass on the Xbox.
The enemy is, of course, different. Apart from the Osama bin Laden
surrogate, Mohammed Jabbour Al Afad, they are nameless and
mostly faceless. At the beginning there is a fast cut scene displaying
masked figures opening a crate of rocket launchers as the U.S. troops
roll into town. Other than this, the Zekistan Liberation Army always
appears from the perspective of its U.S. opponents, as rather rudimentary figures, usually in the mid to far distance, at the end of streets,
behind sandbags, or on rooftops spraying fire down the street. Scarves
often hide their faces. When they are spotted, Alpha and Bravo identify
them as Zekes, Motherfuckers, or, most often, Tangos, from T for
target. They appear with small icons above their heads indicating
whether they are under cover, engaged (that is, pinned down by
incoming fire), or dead marked with skull and crossbones. They thus
do seem like targets on a firing range. When they die, and of course
they must die, nearly all of them, for the player to succeed, they crumple into inert heaps. As Alpha and Bravo pass by, they occasionally give
them an epithet: Should have done something else today, Zeke.
Armed Vision
FSW features aspects of contemporary warfare beyond simply the firepower and discipline of U.S. light infantry, aspects specific to new
media of visualization and virtualization. In an incisive analysis of
armed vision, Jordan Crandall posits that in the history of visual technologies such as photography, cinema, and video, one can distinguish
two major perspectives: horizontal and vertical.25 The horizontal orientation is set at ground level and concerned with the advance or retreat
of sightlines and perspectives along the terrestrial expanse of the earth.
In contrast, the vertical, or aerial, orientation is concerned with looking downward rather than sideways. The vertical dimension is in origin an optic of surveillance and command: Mapping changes and
discovering patterns, the objective was to understand what moves
(troops? construction materials?), how it moves, and how that movement can be intercepted or exploited.26 It adds to our visual experience
an orientation that is somehow ultimately not for us, but rather is the
perspective of a militarized, machinic eye involved in modes of posi-
241
tioning, tracking, identifying, predicting, targeting, and intercepting/

containing.27
Each loading of FSW opens with a vertical perspective, a view as if
from a surveillance satellite: first the earth from space; then a continental view of the Persian Gulf and Central Asia; then a city image; finally
zooming to an overhead view of streets where combat is occurring.
These overhead views are granular, with static intereference, a marked
mediated techno-vision, the optic of miltary command, scoping out the
battlefield from an eye in the sky. Then you are down at street level
with Alpha and Bravo, in the composite collective eye of the squad,
making your way through Zekistan. Here you progress horizontally,
street by street, building by building, corner by corner. The virtual
urban landscape is lavish. Papers blow on the streets, burnt-out cars litter the crossroads, smoke from conflagrations billows thickly upward,
crows and cats rise and run as your squad passes. The squalor of debris,
the beauty of tilework in Islamic palaces, the colours of flaming sunsets
glimpsed at the end of streets, all are rendered in gorgeous detail. But
be entranced at your peril. Simply finding a designated objective can be
a challenge. And since Alpha and Bravo are often outnumbered and
always moving in the open, in the face of waiting enemies, vulnerable
to ambush, it is only by getting some advance warning: in other words,
by invoking vertical vision.
At any moment, pressing key E gives the player, as team leader, a
view of his global positioning system (GPS) receiver. Here you see a
city map, with a view of several blocks surrounding your current position; the two teams are marked; your field of view shows as a green
cone; medical aid points and objectives are displayed; and enemies
appear as red icons. Additionally, you can request helicopter reconnaissance.This invocation vertical vision is especially strongly marked
because the helicopter pilot, although only present as a radio voice, is
the one persistent female presence in the game (the only other women
are medics and aid workers who appear fleetingly). She is (going by the
accent) a black American: Louise. So the move from the horizontal orientation of the grunt infantry on the ground to the vertical, aerial
dimension breaks the games gender code.
If a flight is available, the pilot confirms her approach via radio. The
helicopter can be heard, and, in some of the most striking visual
moments in the game, seen, circling in the sky through gaps in the city
skyline. As she passes overhead, Louise marks enemies on the GPS and
informs the player whether their presence is heavy or light: Tangos
galore, Tangos like ants on soda, Targets up. Such flights are, however, limited: use too many, and Louise may respond to your panicstricken request with a cool Sorry Charlie, thats a negative.
Sometimes fire can be summoned from the sky. A crucial role for
Alpha and Bravo is not directly defeating the Tangos in firefights but
spotting for devastating air or artillery strikes. Here the role of the
infantry is thus, in Crandalls words, to act as a direct human interface
to a machine that cannot yet fully interface with all of the ambiguities of
a material world a function performed in-game by placing a special
green bomb icon on target. After a few moments the screen is rocked
with spectacular explosions, providing a pyrotechnic gratification
acknowledged by one virtual soldiers scripted comment: Ahh never
get tired o that.
This interplay of vertical and horizontal is of course integral to fullspectrum doctrine, which depends on the combination and cooperation of airforce and army into a single invincible striking power. The
first Gulf War was christened the Nintendo War because it introduced
television watchers to game-like perspectives of gunsight and bombnose cameras. FSW takes things further, by offering both vertical and
horizontal perpectives on war, in a situation where the role of the
human horizontal sight is to vector in the apocalyptic power released
from the vertical heights. We experience, virtually, what Crandall terms
the integration of analyst, operator, database, and weapons network
into a smart image ... unlike anything we understand in civilian perspectives. FSW is one of what he calls the new kinds of militarized formats in visual media, fusing technological innovation and the erotic
charge of combat in renewed, compulsive militarization.28
The Big Lie
That videogames are too violent is a common claim. Full Spectrum
Warrior is perhaps not violent enough. As we have noted, the game is
cerebral, almost chess-like. And the price of failure is remarkably low. If
soldiers in Alpha and Bravo are lightly injured, blood spatters across
the screen. If one is more seriously wounded, he falls, and will,
unaided, eventually die. He can, however, be carried by his squad back
to a casualty evacuation point, where healing is almost immediate. The
wounded man staggers to his feet to upbeat comments: Youve still got
your looks, Wow, am I glad to see you again sarge! Hes one tough
son-of-a-bitch.
243
If two or more soldiers are seriously wounded, the mission ends

abruptly. There is a sudden cut to cinematic animations of your team
falling to enemy fire. Soldiers jerk back, crumple to the ground, or are
lifted off their feet by the impact of bullets and hurled through the air in
balletic arcs; fountains of scarlet blood jet from the punctures stitched
across their bodies. The animation and game physics involved in these
moments is extraordinary. Bodies fall realistically in the precise situation where they were hit. So, for example, an infantryman seeking
cover among a stack of crates is caught in a burst of machine-gun fire;
not only is the chipping of containers by bullets striking them and ricocheting around visible, but the unfortunate soldiers cheek slams
against the side of the crate as he is hit, his head snapping back convulsively before he slides to the ground.
All this, however, only lasts an instant. Almost before the player registers that they have led Alpha and Bravo to death and disaster, a voiceover comes up with some good advice: Always use cover. Then the
Mission Over screen appears with the Return to Last Save option,
which restarts the game at the most recent of the designated save points
scattered through its course. This may mean having to repeat several
minutes of manoeuvres, and re-kill a number of Zekes. Let this happen
a few times and whatever horror you may have felt at the deaths of your
men turns to exasperation. It is essential to FSW that time can be reversed
and every mistake undone; the save-die-restart sequence makes Alpha
and Bravo immortal.29 This is, of course, the big lie of war as game.
There are other, minor, subsidiary lies in FSWs virtual war. That missions end if you have more than one serious casualty reflects the U.S.
militarys well-known concern for (and success in) minimizing politically volatile losses to its highly trained post-Fordist techno-soldiers
(The US Army has zero tolerance for casualties! the manual sternly
declares). But it also means you never witness the annihilation of numbers of your own troops. And need it be said? this is war where no
one lies for hours shot in the abdomen shrieking for their mother; has
their testicles blown off; or wakes in hospital finding they have lost a
limb. It is war without mutilation or post-traumatic stress disorder. It is
also war without moral dilemmas. There are almost no civilians. The
miracle of Zekistan is streets are deserted, and houses empty, apart from
the ubiquitous Tangos (who all die instantaneously when hit, vitiating
problems of prison guards or enemies wounded). Air and artillery
strikes do not hit wedding parties. There is no collateral damage. War is
peace.
HA2P1PY9TUR5TLE: Decline and Fall?

Based on an actual training aid for the US Army, declares the FSW
packaging. Immediately after release it was discovered that entering a
cheat code HA2P1PY9TUR5TLE into the Xbox commercial game
unlocked the army version (this option was disabled when the game
was ported to the PC and PS2, suggesting the disclosure was unwelcome to the military). As many reviews of the game attest, a major
attraction of FSW is that it gives gamers a glimpse, if not of real war, at
least of real military virtuality.
The military version plays like the commercial game, but with significant differences. It spans two theatres of war, the Middle East and the
Balkans. The personalization of and banter between soldiers is
removed. So are much of the graphic polish, special lighting, blur
effects, and visual detail. There are no cut scenes. The audio quality is
markedly lower. The rich musical score that added excitement and
intrigue is gone. Apart from faint wind and distant gunfire, all is quiet
in the streets with one exception: civilians speak to your soldiers more
often. In the commercial game this happens very occasionally and is
entirely benign: in one cut scene Arab-American Private Shehadi gets
directions from a friendly Zeke (after a lengthy dialogue in Arabic, the
sergeant asks What did he say? North, replies Shehadi). In the military version, there is some of this fraternization Come this way,
America but also many expressions of hostility: Filthy American
pigs! This is our home, capitalist pigs, or, when the U.S. troops are
facilitating elections, Go home, dont vote. While the civilian game
presents a war of liberation, the military version more accurately familiarizes U.S. soldiers with being unpopular.
Less spectacular than the civilian version, the military game is harder
to survive. Cover is scanter; fewer onscreen icons give information
about the vulnerability of friends and foes; there are more civilians, so
identifying hostiles is harder. The enemy attacks more aggressively,
from a greater variety of directions; the awkward behaviour of weapons like grenades is more accurately represented. Rather than a global
positioning system, the soldier gets a crude hand-drawn map of the
missions, although the interplay between vertical and horizontal
vision is preserved by the ability to lift the point of view hundreds of
feet into the air, seeing the entire map from birds-eye view in real time.
It is possible to modify the quantity and aggressiveness of opposing
force and civilians, and also to change the capacities of ones own
245
troops, altering their accuracy and reaction times. Wounded soldiers

cannot be carried to evacuation points: you gather their weapons and
ammunition and move on. On balance, the military version is a sparer
but more complex and challenging simulation than the civilian game.
But perhaps not complex and challenging enough. In 2005 scandal
erupted around FSW when Taxpayers for Common Sense, an organization critical of the Bush regimes military spending, suggested Sony,
Pandemic, and THQ had obtained massive public subsidization for a
commercial venture that fell far short of military training needs. News
reports suggested FSW should be reinterpreted as Full Spectrum Welfare and that the army had been out-gamed.30 The main source was a
whistle-blowing graphic artist, Andrew Paquette, who claims he was
fired from the FSW development team after writing repeated memos
warning that the game would not be realistic enough for the army. His
main objections concerned the inadequate modelling of the urban environments it purports to represent. Most of the city buildings, Paquette
pointed out, are just facades: those that have interiors can be entered
only on one level. Hence what is usually considered the worst parts of
urban combat floor-to-floor house clearing with enemies lurking in
cellars or upper floors simply doesnt exist. What they did, Paquette
said, was give the Fisher-Price version of a city.31 Suing both Sony and
Pandemic for wrongful dismissal, he said the companies didnt pay
attention to what the army needed and that their attitude was We
dont care about the army, were making money off this.32 These complaints were echoed from other sources. Taxpayers for Common Sense
unearthed internal ICT e-mails warning we have a huge problem on
our hands because the army was not satisfied.33 Military personnel
involved in training corroborated this, saying that the game was
incredibly shallow and had a very limited set of situational challenges.34 ICT spokespeople recouped the situation by ceding ground,
declaring FSW a useful experiment that would improve other training
aids. We have learned a lot, said Macedonia, and thats the purpose of
research to learn those types of things, not to deliver a product.35
Set against the daily death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan (where insurgents now refuse the sort of combat practised in FSW, resorting instead
to tactics of destabilization and mayhem), the scandal around the ICT
expenditures seems trivial. But it provides an insight into the Achilles
heel of full-spectrum doctrine. The Iraqi insurgents or the Taliban cannot better the U.S. army in the field. But they may spend it into the
ground. The low-casualty (for the United States), high-technology
strategy on which the Pentagon depends is monstrously expensive.

Empires vulnerability is not battlefield defeat, but economic crisis
caused by the collapsing overhang of military budgets. The heist of $5
million from the U.S. army by Pandemic, Sony, THQ, and Microsoft is
dwarfed by the war profiteering of corporations such as Halliburton,
but it offers a microcosm of imperial decline and fall.
The Banalization of War
In the short term, however, Full Spectrum Warrior was a success. The
commercial game earned enthusiastic reviews and industry awards,
sold about a million units, and grossed $50 million (U.S.). Pandemic
will release a sequel, Full Spectrum Warrior: Ten Hammers, in 2006. And
despite the furor over funding FSW, on 20 November 2004 the army
awarded ICT a new five-year, $100 million contract. Militarycivilian
game collaborations are an aspect of what Paul Virilio calls pentagoncapitalism.36 Such partnerships contain the possibilities of boondoggles such as occurred with FSW. Yet, in the larger imperial perspective,
even this may be considered money well spent. Here we should return
to the notion of full-spectrum dominance. Implicit in this doctrine is a
lucid understanding of war as a project with not only military but also
ideological and political dimensions. Maintaining an imperial populaces will to fight is as important as battlefield dominance. In a U.S.
context, this is reflected in neoconservative determination to cure the
Vietnam syndrome of peacenik disaffection to which historic humiliation in Southeast Asia is ascribed. From this point of view, whatever the
success or failure of simulators such as FSW in preparing soldiers for
Baghdad, their role in habituating civilians to perpetual war may be as
or more important.
To suggest games such as FSW prepare not only soldiers, but also
civilians, for war is, however, to enter a complex and frustrating debate
about the links from virtual to actual. The success of military simulators
in improving soldiers battlefield performance for example, learning
to fire swiftly and accurately have led video game critics such as Lt.
Col. Grossman to claim first-person shooters constitute informal training to kill.37 Such assertions, widespread after the Columbine massacres, have been revived by the demagogic lawyer Jim Thompson, who
while seeking publicity for victims of alleged video gameinduced
shootings, denounced ICT as a tax payer rip off responsible for training terrorists.38
247
We find these unilinear media-effects claims tempting but unconvincing. Media audiences are composed of subjectivities that are multiplicitous, assembled in manifold and contradictory social formations.
Positions inscribed in games (or other media) are not necessarily replicated by players (or audiences). Simulators in military training are one
relay among the myriad circuits of the war machine part of what we
can loosely term diffuse barracks. From this perspective, virtual violence is part of an ensemble of practices aimed at disinhibiting, disciplining, and directing deadly aggression, ferociously etching direct
lines from simulation to actuality. The idea that these conditions are
replicated every time a shooter is played in a civilian living room is
naive but that they are a component of a broader ensemble of affective circulations that ready bodies and bolster legitimation for war is
less so.39 For when the same identities and assumptions are reiterated
by numerous media channels, and asserted by many institutions, the
chances for their successful reproduction rise. In societies on a war footing, militarization becomes part of the ambience of everyday life. We
enter a version of the society of control, where the boundary between
barracks and the living room is imploded:40 hatred towards an officially
designated enemy, triumph in his death, or at least indifference
towards its necessity, vigilance for his wiles, acceptance of casualties in
the course of struggle, uncritical loyalty for our side, all become values promulgated across a wide social bandwidth, on a full spectrum
from the presidents podium to daily news reports. In the era of war on
terror this is the situation in the heartlands of Empire, and especially in
post-9/11 United States.
In these settings, games such as FSW generate subjectivities to which
war and a very selective rendering of it, as we have seen is increasingly normalized. Such games prompt not atrocities of gothic delinquency but, we would wager, of loyal support for the president and the
troops. Their virtualities enter a polyphonic affective, visual, and ideological chorus supporting militarization. Dissonance is still possible.41
The persistence of anti-war activism within digital game culture itself is
a potent reminder that ludic militarism is contested.42 But the battle
song is loud, the opponents asymmetrical. Referring to the process of
socializing populations for participation in and endurance of endless
imperial counter-insurgency conflicts, Hardt and Negri use the phrase
banalization of war. This phrase, which echoes Hannah Arendt, conveys a situation in which ongoing war is a normalized condition in
which the enemy is regularly depicted as an absolute threat to the eth-
ical order and reduced to an object of routine police repression.43 FSW

contributes to this banalization of war by promoting uncritical identification with imperial troops; by celebrating the virtue of their cause and
the justice of their activities; by routinizing the extermination of the
enemy; by diminishing the horrors of battle and exalting its spectacle;
by forming subjects of, and for, armed vision; by investing pleasurable
affect in military tactics and strategy; and by making players material
partners in beneficiaries of military technoculture. Virtual involvement
of civilian populations in actual imperial war makes military games a
home-front component of full-spectrum dominance. Dont bring out
the general in you! goes Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris ethical
injunction.44 But as one of the developers of Full Spectrum Warrior said
of the game: The bumper sticker version is, Everyones a general.45
NOTES
1 Jordan Crandall, Armed Vision, Multitudes (29 May 2004), http://
multitudes.samizdat.net/article.php3?id_article=1491.
2 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 13.
3 James Der Derian, Virtuous War: Mapping the Military-Industrial-Media Entertainment Network (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2001); Jonathan Burston,
War and the Entertainment Industries: New Research Priorities in an Era of
Cyber-Patriotism, in War and the Media: Reporting Conflict 24/7, ed. Daya
Kishan Thussu and Des Freedman (London: Sage 2003), 16375; Tim Lenoir,
All But War Is Simulation: The Military-Entertainment Complex, Configurations 8, no. 3 (fall 2000): 289335; Stephen Stockwell and Adam Muir, The
Military-Entertainment Complex: A New Facet of Information Warfare,
FibreCulture 1 (2003), http://journal.fibreculture.org. See also Tamara
Vukov, The War Game Room, http://www.pomgrenade.org/WGR, which
provides an outstanding graphic and aural archive of the topics explored
here.
4 See Stephen Kline, Nick Dyer-Witheford, and Greig de Peuter, Digital Play:
The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing (Montreal: McGillQueens University Press, 2003), 8490, 99101.
5 KumaWar, http://www.kumawar.com/.
6 Department of Defense Game Developers Community, http://www.
dodgamecommunity.com/index.php.
7 Der Derian, Virtuous War.
249
8 Michael Macedonia, A View from the Military, Defense Horizons (11 April
2002), http://www.ndu.edu/inss/DefHor/DH11/DH11.htm.
9 ICT Web page, http://www.ict.usc.edu/disp.php?bd=about.
10 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020 (Washington, DC: U.S.
Government Printing Office, June 2000). Inside front cover available online,
http://www.dtic.mil/jointvision/jvpub2.htm.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 For discussion of the full-spectrum concept, see Rahul Mahajan, Full Spectrum Dominance: U.S. Power in Iraq and Beyond (New York: Seven Stories,
2003).
14 Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Vision 2020.
15 Mike Davis, The Pentagon as Global Slumlord (19 April 2004), retrieved
from http://www.tomdispatch.com.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 James Korris, Full Spectrum Warrior: How the Institute for Creative
Technologies Built a Cognitive Training Tool for Xbox, http://www.
asc2004.com/Manuscripts/sessionI/IP-09.pdf.
19 Ibid.
20 Full Spectrum Warrior Instruction Manual.
21 Brian Massumi, Requiem for Our Prospective Dead: Toward a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power, in Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in
Politics, Philosophy and Culture, ed. Eleanor Kaufman and Kevin Jon Heller
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1998) 4064.
22 Quoted in Bill Adair, Did the Army Get Out-Gamed? Washington Times,
20 February 2005.
23 Full Spectrum Warrior Instruction Manual.
24 David M. Halbfinger and Steven A. Holmes, Military Mirrors Working
Class America, New York Times, 30 March 2003, http://www.radicalmiddle.
com/military_mirrors.htm.
25 Crandall, Armed Vision.
26 Ibid.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 For discussion of the argument that save-die-restart makes games inherently trivial, see James Newman, Videogames (London: Routledge, 2004),
846.
30 Adair, Did the Army Get Out-Gamed?
31 Ibid.

32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Paul Virilio, Strategy of Deception (London: Verso, 2000).
David Grossman, On Killing: The Psychological Costs of Learning to Kill in War
and Society (Boston: Little Brown, 1996).
Jim Thompson, Open Letter to the Members of the Entertainment Software
Association (14 July 2005), available online at http://www.kotaku.com/
gaming/top/thompson-calls-for-esa-pres-resignation-112565.php.
Massumi, Requiem for Our Prospective Dead, 44.
Gilles Deleuze, Postscript on the Society of Control, October 59 (1992): 38.
See Vukov, The War Game Room.
We discuss counterwar games in our essay A Playful Multitude? Mobilizing and Counter-Mobilizing Immaterial Game Labour, Fibreculture 5,
http://www.journal.fibreculture.org.
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 13.
Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 245.
James Korris, quoted in Steve Silberman, The War Room, Wired, September
2004.
13 The Dialectics of Canadian Film Labour:

Technology, Globalization, Nation
j o h n m c cullough
Its changed from working in a coal mine where you handle the film and its
more physical to feeling a bit atrophied because you sit all the time and your
mind and eyes carry all the weight ... mostly you dont get up because its so
fast and easy.
Dede Allen, editor of Bonnie and Clyde, Dog Day Afternoon, Reds1
The studios used to be the schools. Now [the schools] are just churning them
out. I dont know where all these kids go. The market cant sustain it, unless the
world is turning into a big entertainment centre.
Marv Newland, CEO, International Rocketship Productions (Vancouver)2
With sequels of the Gulf War and the latest Hollywood blockbuster
occupying our free time, Newlands observation about the world as a
big entertainment centre seems somewhat banal. But the underlying
logic of the state of affairs he describes is actually a complex story
about culture, labour, and meaning. For instance, one of the implications of Newlands comments is that not only is the real world being
effaced by image-based entertainment, but this simulated world is a
response to a labour crisis in the overdeveloped animation sector of the
volatile global film market. His comments also draw attention to the
particularly dynamic nature of the Canadian film industry, which now
consists of a large number of independent producers who use local and
regional inducements (including surplus labour pools and tax relief) to
compete globally. This process, which sees Canadian cultural production transform itself into global economic activity, is a central theme of
this essay, and I hope that my analysis will be useful in suggesting the
252 John McCullough
place of labour in contemporary culture. For, as Newland and Allen

make clear, there remains an intimate relationship between the nature
of work and the forms of culture, even in the post-work world of digital entertainment.
Contemporary global image-making is characterized by scattered
independent production, rigorously controlled centralized distribution
(including copyright enforcement), and extraordinary dependence on
high-end technology. This last characteristic has most recently featured
the extensive use of computers to construct film worlds. There are several good examples, including Pixar Animation Studio and Lucasfilms
success with digital image technology. In fact, the extensive use of computer-generated image (CGI) techniques and software in all films and
commercials, as well as video games, television shows, and films, generally, has fuelled the emergence of multimedia conglomerates exploiting both information and entertainment markets. Advanced digital
technology has helped create a fluid, powerful, and global ownership
structure, reflecting neoliberal economic beliefs and a dominant ideology which welds technological innovation to popular culture and
entertainment. The political economy of contemporary media features
virtual monopolies, dedicated to information and cultural management, and a contracted labour force which is organized around a number of highly specialized tasks and widely dispersed production sites.3
This essay presumes that the conditions described above are generally accurate for global media practice. My analysis of Canadian film
and television labour assumes that inasmuch as Canada is a cultural
exporter and importer, thoroughly dependent on the global image market, a materially sound description of contemporary media culture can
also serve as a useful introduction to Canadian image culture. Furthermore, to the extent that Canadian film and television production and
consumption are typical of generally recognized global patterns, it is
difficult to think of Canadian film and television culture as authentically unique. In fact, this is the assumption that underlies Richard Collinss concept of Canadianization, which he uses to describe Canadas
responses to the, by now, worldwide phenomenon of American cultural imperialism.4 Those who borrow Collinss perspective argue that
attempts by Canadian state institutions and policies to impose, or
induce, a nationalist cultural identity in order to protect a national polity do not secure Canadian sovereignty or identity so much as admit
the failure of the project.5 From this perspective, any national culture
that needs to be insulated from a variety of historical and existing eco-
The Dialectics of Canadian Film Labour
253
nomic, political, legal, pedagogical, geographical, and social contradictions will inevitably create abstract and idealized standards of national
identity. By contrast, lived Canadian culture has always been experienced as fully contradictory.
The imposed national culture (which is always a negotiation with
international commercial interests) is a simulation and is usefully
understood in the context of the critique of the culture industries as
developed by Adorno and Horkheimer and, later, Debord and the situationists. As well, this critical commentary on inauthentic national culture is related to some of the scholarly analysis that has focused its
attention on the mechanism of Canadianization the Canadian state.
Ted Magder, Manjunath Pendakur, and Michael Dorland have all analysed Canadian state film policy, as well as the historical organization of
film and television industries and audiences in Canada.6 Dorland
points out the resistance, in Canada, to understanding culture and
economy as overlapping spheres. As he points out, this gap derived in
part from the fact that cultural activities were not as profitable as economic activity.7 Nonetheless, while the federal government may have
been slow to see the economic value of cultural production in Canada,
preferring to use film as an information and propaganda tool, some
regional and provincial jurisdictions have used movies and television
as an economic engine for decades. Gasher points out, for instance, that
the British Columbia government has been involved in creating a
favourable environment for Hollywood since early in the last century.8
I will argue from a relatively typical position that the two forms of
development (cultural and economic) must be understood as conjoined, particularly in the context of what is now called globalization.
Fredric Jameson makes the overlap of culture and economy explicit
when he observes that, for instance, commodity production is now a
cultural phenomenon, in which you buy the product fully as much for
its image as for its immediate use.9
Consider the case of Molsons. This once-Canadian brewing concern
has performed well against its main competitor, Labatts (which was
once also fully Canadian owned), by emphasizing Canadian national
identity, particularly when advertising its Canadian brand. For example, prior to 9/11, Molsons produced a series of audaciously nationalist
(in some cases, anti-American) television commercials that serve to
emphasize Jamesons point about the overlap of economy and culture.
In a neoliberal economic context, in which the state mobilizes to accommodate globalization, it is not surprising to find the market replacing
254 John McCullough
the state as the promotional arm of the Canadian nation. The explicit
convergence of patriotic propaganda and commercial advertising was
well received, but it is unsettling in its implications for the further erosion of the distinction between corporate and national identity and,
more generally, capitalism and democracy. Moreover, the chauvinism
and xenophobia expressed in the ads were notable, and it is hard to
imagine that such a tone would be tolerated in a state-sponsored commercial or political statement. This suggests one more area of contemporary social life in which the state has been outpaced by the markets
response to populist desire. One campaign, I Am Joe, was so popular
that it became an alternate national anthem during hockey playoffs in
2000 and 2001. Ironically, and predictably, the actor who played Joe was
so encouraged by his success as a national icon that he moved to Hollywood. With these types of stories in mind, and particularly in light of
Telefilm (1982) and free trade (1988), I consider Canadian film and television to be involved in a dialectical struggle which is alternately cultural and economic. Which is to say that Canadian film and television
culture is an ideological construct of an imagined industry and an imagined national identity. What follows is an admittedly general institutional analysis of the Canadian film and television industries. It
provides a series of insights that serve, provisionally, to describe the current conditions of industrial cultural production as they are influenced
by changes in the international division of film and television labour.
One of this essays central arguments is that the recent reorganization
of film and television labour has had the consequence of altering media
workers relationship to traditions of image-making. My analysis will
focus on four areas: (1) atomization and the current ambiguity regarding responsibility for image-making; (2) changes in technology and the
loss of the workforce; (3) non-U.S. labour used in Global Hollywood;
and (4) the contemporary Canadian film and television labour experience. Each of these areas provides a variety of insights, but I will tend to
generalize in order to provide a useful sketch of the overall situation.
Conditions of film and television work have changed considerably
since the first conceptions and discourse emerged about filmmaking,
but these conditions are rarely portrayed or acknowledged except as
corporate celebrations of the media industries evolution, or as denigration in regards to the perceived low artistic standards and coarse craftsmanship of contemporary image-making. In many cases, there has
been a deskilling and instrumentalization of film and television labour,
which is related to increased commercial, technocratic, and technologi-
255
cal interference and mediation. One can imagine a variety of examples

drawn from all areas of the industry: cinematographers who are constrained by commercial imperatives, editors whose work is now organized by digital editing and software innovation, and projectionists
whose job has been changed by platform systems and digital projection. All of these examples speak to the potential degradation of work,
but there has also been a democratization of the knowledge and technology involved in making and distributing images in contemporary
culture. These contradictions emerge and form the backbone of culture
(national and otherwise) in the contemporary context, and my argument is that the analysis of national culture looks different through the
lens of labour than it does through that of the state or that of cultural or
corporate elites (groups whose views have been widely perpetuated
and legitimated).
Atomization and Responsibility in Image-Making
In an early conceptualization of the photographer, which has had
implications for cinematographers (especially documentarists), the
theme of responsibility is prominent.10 The image-maker, from this perspective, is responsible to the subject photographed, to the context lost
due to framing, to the manipulation and distribution of the image, and
to the traditions of culture which impact on the process of image-making. These ethical parameters were developed as the means by which
the practice of image reproduction could be controlled, in a way that
did not solely relate to economic exploitation or the concept of offering
whatever the market would bear. In this sense, image-making was considered a substantial privilege, with attendant responsibilities which
capital did not necessarily erode. Ultimately, the pressure to market
images, and to use images in a commercial context, has led to a series of
more or less misguided discussions of the ethics of taking pictures and
image-making. From the perspective of contemporary media culture,
these discussions now appear somewhat quaint, as well as being
admissions that liberal humanism, and the responsibilities of so-called
civil society and, by extension, the concept of the rationality of the public sphere, are in the last stages of their dominance in the North. Daily,
humanist sentiment is overwhelmed by the commercial demands of the
culture industries, as though culture is now only about getting noticed
and making money. At the same time, we are encouraged to believe
that technological developments guarantee greater objectivity in the
256 John McCullough
image-making process and thus the possibility of increased access to

the real. But, in the contemporary setting, with the ability to take,
make, and distribute images without human participation, there has
developed a complex social realization that we live and breathe in a
surveillance society of the spectacle. Only the thinnest of lip service is
paid to image ethics, and there is a general consensus that Orwells
Big Brother does exist. Further, there is a willingness to believe that if
humans do not get paid for images, machines will.
In fact, getting paid is the single greatest influence in contemporary
image culture. The turning over of culture to commercial entertainment
industries and the aggressive marketing of culture have given rise to a
labour force which is dedicated to receiving fair market value for their
images, their skills, and their technology. Due to owners concentrated
wealth and power, and labours largely specialized, dispersed, and
freelance status, all of this is negotiated in an increasingly unregulated
and competitive image and labour marketplace, which is generally, and
overwhelmingly, a buyers market. This leaves workers and their locals
(when they are organized) typically isolated and overpowered by
ownership. In fact, one of the problems of perceiving and understanding labours role in contemporary media culture is its organization
around atomized tasks, disparate and hidden worksites (e.g., homebased workstations), and individually contracted (and sub-contracted)
labour. On top of all this, neoliberal state initiatives and representatives
eagerly encourage American and international investment in Canadian
cultural production by bending or breaking organized labours negotiated contracts. These features of contemporary film and television
labour create a situation in which cultural work is made somewhat
ephemeral, and even transparent, and seems to not be work at all. In
fact, to raise the idea of the film and television workforce, in the contemporary context, is to run into difficulty defining the object of study in a
way that was never so acute when considering the worlds studio systems. These earlier examples of image culture industries provide fixed
spatial sites, which can be considered tangible as fixed capital. In these
cases, the designation of a workforce, which was present in the studios,
actually makes sense, because these workers were a clear force to be
negotiated in the production of culture. Nowadays, films are made in a
variety of locations (real and virtual), and the concept of the Hollywood
studio and backlot, as a factory (although these resources are still utilized), is perceived as an anachronism. Even television studios fail to
impress the viewer as worksites so much as technology and research
centres (e.g., CNN and CHUM-CITY). Within the new media spaces,
257
contract technicians and freelance specialists hover at computer consoles, which are their point of entry into a network that provides them
access to power and identity. From some perspectives, the network connection that is encouraged by digital filmmaking and television can be
understood as rhizomatic and utopian. But the dystopian characteristics of this technology relate to the increased potential atomization
prevalent in computer networks. Baudrillard once described the identity encouraged by this structure as being as grand as a node, enmeshed
in the screen and network.11 Scott Bukatman calls this terminal identity, which well describes the subjectivity emblematic of the globalized
digital factory.12 It is also the work experience described by John, a digital animator driven to anonymity in order to protect his job: Work is so
desperate that people will do anything to stay on, people are working
themselves to death.13
Technology and the Loss of the Workforce
While there are a variety of reasons for the changed perception of film
and television work, it is necessary to think of technology as absolutely
crucial in definitions of contemporary culture industries, including
ideas about the workers in that industry. Foremost in this regard is the
fact that while the culture industries, globally, have expanded enormously since the Second World War (and with it labour forces), competition between owners to reduce the cost of labour has also intensified.
One of the ways this has been achieved is through the introduction of
machines, which rationalize the production process. For instance, the
Avid editing system allows for reduced overhead costs such as maintenance of an editing room, but it also, remarkably, helps to control flexible costs of production by regulating and storing a typically timeconsuming labour practice (e.g., recutting versions of the film). In a
sense, what makes Avid an offline machine is that it allows for the
meter of labour costs to be turned off. While this often provides greater
flexibility for independent filmmakers, editors in the industry become
subject to the effects of flexible accumulation. David Harvey describes
these effects in the following way:
New technologies have empowered certain privileged layers, at the same
time as alternative production and labour control systems open up the
way to high remuneration of technical, managerial, and entrepreneurial
skills. The trend, further exaggerated by the shift to services and the
enlargement of the cultural mass, has been to increasing inequalities of
258 John McCullough

income, perhaps presaging the rise of a new aristocracy of labour as well
as the emergence of an ill-remunerated and broadly disempowered
under-class.14
The advantages to capital of such technology are obvious, but this

change to labour practice must also be considered in the context of the
loss of the space of editing, which used to contribute to the overall
space of film production. I am thinking here, for instance, of Dorothy
Arzners fond recounting of her apprenticeship as an early hand-cutting editor and her subsequent development as a feature film director.15
Specifically, it is necessary to recognize how her sense of autonomy
contrasts with the potential atomization of digital editing. In digital
editing, the instrumentalization of the editing process encourages
everyone to present themselves as skilled editors, although the skills
have been achieved not so much through production as through consumption (of technology and software). One of the results of digital
editing is an intensified fragmentation of the filmmaking process and a
devaluation of the various skills invested in making movies. Dede
Allen explains:
Often the studio would get involved with a cut and executives would go
down to the Avid and want to see it. I think digital editing has created an
environment where everybody thinks they know how to be a filmmaker,
even if they dont have any idea how to do it.16
For those workers who gain privilege in the context of flexible accumulation, they become, as Harvey describes them, an aristocracy
within the film labour force. No doubt, this new aristocracy knows the
value of having the right tools. For example, in an interview with Lee
Unkrich, supervising editor on A Bugs Life (U.S., 1998, John Lasseter
and Andrew Stanton), the overwhelming impression is that the editors
talents and obvious enthusiasm are tied to the technology just as a cart
is yoked to an ass. Nonetheless, part of the attraction of Unkrichs job as
a supervising editor is that, in the combination that is him and his
machine, he has the ability to play a significant role in the creation of a
multimillion-dollar cultural artifact. The reason his contribution is significant is that his position, according to the division of labour in his
digital factory, allows him access to most parts of the production process. He is, in this sense, an important node in the production network.
While the job is standardized by the technology, the status that the technology confers is substantial and pays off in terms of being able to pipe
259
in and shape the film, define the characters, and just knock ideas
around. Ultimately, the job seems to be equal parts creative expression
and surveillance. Unkrich explains: I have to be the one person who is
looking at the film as a whole, looking at global continuity issues,
because everyone else is really focused on the minutiae of the shot they
are working on.17 So, while the supervising editor, working through
the Avid, claims global perspective, there are two points worth noting:
(1) the workers under the supervisor are regarded as working on minutiae, and this reminds us of the hierarchic, highly structured, and specialized nature of the work, and (2) the global view is one that is only
directed at the film structure as the largest possible unit of meaning.
Here, not even the A Bugs Life franchise comes under Unkrichs view,
let alone the larger frame of the responsibilities inherent in cultural production, specifically the politics and ethics of image-making. The disconnectedness of this workforce from earlier traditions of imagemaking is amplified when their freelance status is considered. Without
an identity grounded in a place, or organized by a collective activity,
these workers assume identities derived from the values that dominate
the other spaces they occupy especially those of the market.
No doubt, the market is the predominant space and force in these
workers lives and, because the contemporary film and television
workplace rarely looks like or operates like a production plant, these
workers consider themselves, and are considered to be, white-collar
professionals, not blue-collar labourers. This is an achievement which
favours capital, and it is an astounding ideological triumph which even
eluded the union-bashing monopolies of the golden age of Hollywood,
which, at the very least, had to negotiate with organized labour.18 New
Hollywood has left the troublesome battle with labour to independent
producers and politicians, but this has tended to fragment the labour
movements in the entertainment industries, as independent operators
use one group of workers against others, technology against workers,
and one state subsidy against another. In some extraordinary cases,
union locals work to undercut their brothers and sisters in other locals
in order to secure contracts. The obvious net result is the loss of power
for organized labour in the culture industry.
Non-U.S. Workforces in Global Hollywood
U.S.-based producers also undercut film labour by introducing nonunion and non-U.S.-based workforces into the production cycle. This
practice resembles export-processing industrial models, which attempt
260 John McCullough
to achieve structural efficiency by retaining high-income specialty jobs

in the domestic market (e.g., in the culture industries these would
include talent, casting agents, producers, writers and directors, designers), while shifting labour-intensive tasks to low-wage areas of the
world.19 This creates a situation in which lucrative and glamorous
design-oriented jobs are centred in Los Angeles and its surrogate cities
around the globe; low-paid general skill jobs are completed in contexts
of underdevelopment; and high-speculation profitable promotion and
marketing jobs are clustered in metropolitan centres. While this strategy is generalized across all media production, it is most obvious in
commercial work and, in particular, television product and especially
labour-intensive processes such as animation. The Simpsons is a good
example of this, and, predictably, one of its episodes even satirizes its
complicity with this mode of production. This also routinely occurs in
the well-known production practice that sees American film and television productions run away to cheaper Canadian resources in order to
offset the costs of celebrity U.S. screen talent.20
In the context of this particular business strategy, the theme of Canadas brain drain gains prominence. That is, to the extent that some
Canadian workers have elite training and skills, it is in Hollywoods
interest to control or manage this resource for its own specific benefit.
On the one hand, the principle of leaving these specialists in Canada,
and underpaying them accordingly, is sometimes an effective form of
control. Canadian actor and three-time Dora award winner Kristen
Thomson describes this situation well:
I loved working with Stockard Channing and Sam Waterson, who were
both gracious and fine, but were not in the same orbit anyway ... We dont
really do the same job. They are leading actors in a particular kind of film
and Im just getting some experience.21
Notable in her account is her sense that shes just getting some experience when working for Hollywood. The meaning of this is quite slippery, though, as it can be read in at least two different ways. First, we
can read these comments as indicating that she thinks her work is different from that of the American stars and, moreover, that this difference is marked by Canadian inferiority. This internalized form of
control, which is one manner of colonization by Hollywood, can be
seen to affect a variety of Canadian producers, directors, actors, cinematographers, and postproduction staff. As Gordon Hardwick, man-
261
ager of community affairs for the B.C. Film Commission, admits: One
of the biggest problems weve had is the negative campaign from the
States ... and nothing is necessarily going to change their attitudes
except a positive show of Canadian integrity.22 Of course, Hollywood
can presume this paternalistic posture and demand integrity (which
really means Canadian subservience), because the Canadian economy
is fully integrated with U.S.-based media interests. Dan Johnson, film
policy consultant and CEO of Humewood Communications, explains
that multimillion-dollar investments in Canada by American productions generate significant service sector economic activity affiliated
with the film industry. He correctly observes that if Americans were
discouraged from making movies in Canada, it would adversely affect
companies which supply equipment, trucks, food, locations and so
on.23
Hollywood also exerts substantial explicit control over elite workers
by hiring them as part of the American domestic workforce, and this is
what constitutes the official brain drain by Canadian standards. In
response to this situation, Canadian nationalists and certain offices of
the state charged with resource management argue that Canadian culture is being diluted due to the economic disparity between the homegrown film and television industry and Hollywood. This is the basis
for the venerable Canadian tradition of blaming economic underdevelopment for cultural underdevelopment. But it rings hollow for three
immediate reasons: (1) the elite training received by Canadians must
always be seen within the context of the exigencies of specialist work
discussed above, which tends to subvert national or regional identities
in favour of generic skill competency; (2) elite training is often supported by the Canadian state and corporate sector in order to bolster
Canadian industry not Canadian identity (and so it is naive to assume
that these workers should restrict their aspirations to the farm team if
they have a shot at the majors); and (3) workers usually invest in specialized training to augment their own conspicuous consumption, not
to make conspicuous their Canadian cultural identity. To return to
Kristen Thomson, we can see that when she says shes just getting
some experience, this need not be read as a lament for the nation, but
as an admission that she is apprenticing in Hollywood, with an eye to
gaining all the privilege which that implies. In this sense, the domination thesis is subverted by workers who understand Canadian dependency and work to advance their own economic security and career
trajectory.
262 John McCullough
The Contemporary Canadian Film and Television

Labour Experience
There are a lot of people floating around. Were getting calls from all over from
people looking for work ... It was bound to happen.
Mark Freedman,
President, Association of British Columbia Animation Producers24
The theme of U.S. cultural imperialism, always a significant feature in

Canadian cultural debates, is intensified in the current global context,
which has enthusiastically embraced neoliberal market principles in
relationship to cultural production. But this dominance manifests itself
in contradictory ways in the contemporary setting. On the one hand,
films and television made in Canada (if not in numbers, then at least in
dedicated resources) are overwhelmingly made to be sold in an international market that nonetheless speaks the language of Hollywood. The
producers of these cultural artifacts, then, are doing various degrees of
indirect branch plant service to the extent that they are making Hollywood product. By slight contrast, another group of Canadian film and
television workers get their paycheques directly from Tinseltown. This
group directs, writes, lights, grips, plans, shoots, and edits Hollywood
films and television (both in Canada and around the world), almost
exclusively in the form of contract labour. If they work internationally,
these workers are truly an elite and they live a life of professional privilege, which includes high stress, air miles, and moving bills. If the job
is done in Canada, there is a good chance that it will have been fought
over by several jurisdictions (e.g., municipalities, provinces, regions,
and even union locals), all of which now understand culture to be fully
economic. In fact, so much of this inter-jurisdiction competition has
emerged in Canada that it allows some regional workers and industry
to anticipate a year-round cycle of work. The shortcomings of this have
included a generalized resentment towards, or wholesale abandonment of, the union project by many cultural workers. As well, there is a
renewed and intensified influence of the state, not only in negotiating
deals, but aggressively closing them. This process has also involved the
expanding assumption that Hollywood is a legitimate standard for cultural production. Such reification of national cultural production is
seen particularly clearly from the Canadian perspective. Specifically, to
the extent that Hollywood is integrated into the careers and livelihoods
263
of thousands of Canadian workers associated with the film and television industry, as well as providing entertainment which orders these
workers leisure time, Hollywood can be said to have effectively
capitalized on its legitimation, by exploiting them as both producers
and consumers. But for many Canadian film and television workers,
Hollywood is not the enemy because, despite the fact that it orders their
free time and seduces away their paycheque, it also provides their
paycheque. And because Hollywood is still Hollywood, these paycheques are considered to be value-added.
Given all this (i.e., specialized and atomized tasks, new technology,
and Hollywoods market dominance), Canadian film and television
worker identity is necessarily and thoroughly contradictory. It is characterized most obviously by: (1) the loss of autonomy and craft, which
has been superseded by technological interfaces and standardization;
(2) a sense of displacement associated with the job (both spatial and
social); (3) the dubious fortune of living in a U.S.-supplement nation;
and (4) the emergence of a global cultural sphere, which is characterized by aggressive neoliberal capitalism and atrophied state support
for non-commercial culture. In such a context, it is highly unlikely that
a unique or discernible Canadian film and television culture will
emerge. In fact, what is interesting about the Canadian situation is that
it is becoming the norm, and this suggests something about changes in
the concepts of culture and national culture that will become increasingly problematic. By looking at cultural labour, one can understand
the true heterogeneity of contemporary entertainment. For instance,
recently in Toronto, the cinematographer Derek Vanlint, who is famous
for his chilling images of dystopian futurescapes in Alien (UK/U.S.,
1979, Ridley Scott) images of such graphic power that we must consider the possibility that we have already seen our futures was busy
shooting a pizza commercial. Not only that, but this international talent
(now based in Canada) was working second unit on the commercial,
applying his particular talents to capturing the beauty of rising crusts.
Despite the fact that this commercial work seems to be a retrograde creative move for someone of such obvious talent and stature, it is important to realize that for elite media workers, the ultimate goal is often to
work on commercials, given that they require less commitment in
terms of time and energy, and the pay is proportionately greater. In
such a situation, it makes sense that workers would prefer work that,
by standards of national culture or artistic vision, seems degraded and
generic, because Global Hollywood teaches us that commerce is the
264 John McCullough
heart of film and television culture, and that risk must constantly be
avoided. This message is learned by everyone in the industry, and especially those who have survived the industry (such as Vanlint); and in
order to understand the value and meaning of culture today, one must
appreciate these labour conditions. This is also fundamental to understanding the ways in which independent producers and cultural workers are integrated into Global Hollywood. For instance, to return to
Pixar, we see that the extraordinary talents of independent digital animators gave rise to a particular look in Toy Story, but this talent is now
locked into this aesthetic style, which has effectively become recognizable as the Pixar brand, and hence protected by everyone involved in
the franchise who see this aesthetic as their guarantee of a paycheque.
This logic encourages repetition, standardization, and eventually the
routinization of work done at Pixar, as investors focus on expanded distribution of the commodity and protection of the brand and invest proportionately less money on experimental research or development of a
new style. Moreover, in order to cut through the clutter of a glutted
entertainment market, there is an unwritten rule that unique, sometimes personal, style (beyond content) is absolutely mandatory in
attracting an audience. So there is an intensified emphasis on marketing product which amplifies the role of design and aesthetics, including
the design of logos, titles, and packaging (including websites, press
kits, and information packets). While this is not new to industrial media
production, its scale is unprecedented, and the result is that it is difficult to find a space in visual culture that is not touched by the influence
of Global Hollywood. All film and television workers now have to
think about labour issues, in particular their own jobs, in relation to the
marketing of culture, for the more legs their project has, the greater the
chance they will continue working. This frenzy of self-promotion is so
generalized that even avant-garde, documentary, and alternative filmmakers, having internalized the logic of consumerism, also put a lot of
work into promoting their work, including designing a package that
signifies their brand of art.
The use of culture to generate capital, generally, is related to a long
history of attempts to give aesthetic value to standardized, marketable
commodities. Walter Benjamin recognized this democratization of the
aesthetic as the end of aura. The amplification, in the digital age, of
Benjamins revelation forces us to confront the seemingly inevitable
conclusion that art has become a displaced and empty signifier, serving
now only to aestheticize history. It recalls the scene in Ken Finkle-
265
mans The Newsroom (Canada, 19967, CBC-TV) in which the news producer and technician, looking for images to pastiche together to
introduce their fast-breaking story, huddle over an editing console, flippantly sorting through files of famous images of tragedies in history,
juxtaposing histories that are politically volatile or trivialized by their
new context. The scene is comedic because the images are both more
empty and more loaded than expected, but the underlying tragic
theme is that photography allows, and encourages, an irreverence to
the markers of history and to the idea of history itself.
My intention, in opening this essay with reference to image ethics,
was that, at a certain point, the loss of aura, or lack of grounding,
inherent in modern image technologies (from 1830 to present), engenders a series of boundary transgressions that touch on significant ethical issues. For instance: the real becomes effaced by the image, the affect
is valued independent of its cause, the artifact exists apart from its production, the aesthetic masks the apparatus of industrial commerce
that structures the uses of art. These points draw attention to the aesthetics, technologies, and workers involved in the creation of that
increasingly valuable commodity that is culture. The dialectic of labour
and culture includes, for example, the ways in which music videos
have appropriated aesthetic value from young workers (e.g., the directors, shooters, performers, technicians, programmers, designers, and so
on) and have rewarded many of these young workers by putting them
in other products owned by the parent company (sometimes a transnational corporation) in a sense, to use unique work as a saleable
commodity, by calling it style. The careers of David Fincher, Michel
Gondry, Spike Jonze, and Canadas Mr X are fair examples. Or take
Spike Lees aesthetic value as he moves from auteur film, to ads, to
the sidelines of Madison Square Garden for Knicks games. In each manifestation, his cultural value is understood to be real value (i.e., capital),
and these values are related, in complex ways, to labour value. When
Lee is seen making a film, he is understood to be labouring for love and
art; when he shoots the ad, he is doing trash for cash; and when he
promotes New York City (and himself) at MSG, he doesnt seem to be
working at all (which, this suggests, is one of the fringe benefits of
being a cultural producer its not really work!). By treating film and
television labour in this fashion, the industry is able to generate a variety of stories about the perceived value and meaning of culture. These
are also stories about the capitalized value of contemporary aesthetics,
and they encourage people in the world to consider how these different
266 John McCullough
labour situations, and the styles they help generate, manifest themselves as differential registers of individual, personal wealth.
While my focus on labour highlights the contemporary aesthetic
from the perspective of pragmatic decisions regarding deployment of
industry resources, it is also clear that this is not simply a story about
the political economy of Canadian film and television activity. I have
shown that the labour perspective helps us understand the impossibility of precisely naming a national culture, but this then introduces the
possibility that we could think of culture as something that is made
according to prevalent conditions of practice, and hence inspired by the
heterogeneous ways in which we can imagine film and television playing a role in our lives. The point, then, is less to name culture than to
understand the box within which it exists. In this sense, my emphasis
on market imperatives helps us understand the influence of commerce
in the style, treatment, and forms of all contemporary film and television cultural work, including that which is not primarily intended for
commercial consumption. The role of advertising, and the central place
of consumerism in cultural artifacts, not only is standard operating procedure in the private sector of media culture, but it actually provides a
sense of foundation to an activity which has lost connection to earlier
aesthetic, political, and social traditions. In fact, recent National Film
Board of Canada (NFB) advertisements, intended to recruit new workers, emphasized that the successful candidates would be joining a
team of dynamic, young, media-savvy professionals, proving that
even state filmmaking agencies have begun to speak the language of
Global Hollywood.
It is interesting, then, to reassess the various earlier attempts by the
Canadian government to organize a national film and television culture
around the centralized and service-oriented projects of the NFB and the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). These efforts effectively
brought workers within a somewhat uniform work schedule and
labour contract and, in doing so, provided the basis for a similarly uniform cultural project. That cultural workers were used in this manner,
to develop an affirmative image of the nation, is common knowledge to
most film and television scholars in Canada. But it is worth considering
the national identity-image that is being constructed by contemporary
Canadian media industries and their workers. Brenda Longfellows
analysis of The Red Violin (Canada, 1998, Franois Girard) is instructive
in this regard, for it claims that a reading of the film must acknowledge
the ways in which capital represents itself and is figured in media arti-
267
facts (even those which claim to be expressions of national and not

commercial culture). In the case of The Red Violin, its fetishization of the
instrument (and the artisan labour that produced it) is related to the
films subterranean desire to privilege commodity fetishism in the context of globalization. Longfellow claims that the deployment of such a
romanticism exists only as a nostalgic alibi for the ubiquitous and
overweening power of money.25
This should remind us of the enduring relevance and possible
contemporary applications of Peter Morriss provocative phrase embattled shadows.26 We have to ask: what is being obscured in the Canadian film and television industry during globalization? My argument
would be that labour, like capital, is also figured in the identity of a
cultural artifact. But in this conjuncture, in which the market is hegemonic, film and television workers are paid to live in the shadows of
Hollywood: obediently consuming their productivity and misrecognizing their labour as the figures of triumphant global capital. Torontobased actor Alex Poch-Goldin describes the challenge of acting in a
Hollywood product: I have to tell myself that Im here to do a job. My
job is to provide support for the lead performer.27 Almost invariably, of
course, the lead character is an American star, and, in this instance, it is
easy to understand what Marx and Engels meant when they wrote that,
in its initial stages, class struggles correspond with national struggles.28
Daily, Canadian workers negotiate a space, within Hollywood, for their
labour. Ultimately, we see cultural forms which correspond to these
class, national, and labour relations, and, judging by the product, the
lesson to be learned is that the worlds film labour cannot afford to
resist Hollywood.
NOTES
1 Quoted in Mia Goldman, Dede on Digital: An Interview with Dede Allen
(Part 1), Motion Picture Editors Guild Magazine 21, no. 3 (MayJune 2000),
http://www.editorsguild.com/newsletter/MayJun00/dede.html.
2 Quoted in Sarah Schmidt, Thats All, Folks, Globe and Mail, 29 May 2000, R1.
3 George Gerbner, Hamid Mowlana, and Herbert I. Schiller, eds, Invisible
Crises: What Conglomerate Control of Media Means for America and the World
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
4 Richard Collins, Culture, Communication and National Identity: The Case of
Canadian Television (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990).
268 John McCullough

5 For a succinct overview and current collection of essays which discuss
efforts to define Canadian national culture, see Jody Berland and Shelley
Hornstein, eds, Capital Cultural: A Reader on Modernist Legacies, State Institutions, and the Value(s) of Art (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queens University Press, 2000).
6 Ted Magder, Canadas Hollywood: The Canadian State and Feature Films (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993); Manjunath Pendakur, Canadian
Dreams and American Control: The Political Economy of the Canadian Film Industry (Toronto: Garamond Press, 1990); and Michael Dorland, So Close to the
State/s: The Emergence of Canadian Feature Film Policy (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1998).
7 Dorland, So Close to the State/s, 39.
8 Mike Gasher, Hollywood North: The Feature Film Industry in British Columbia
(Vancouver: UBC Press, 2002).
9 Fredric Jameson, Globalization and Political Strategy, New Left Review 4
(July-August 2000): 53.
10 Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby, eds, Image Ethics: The Moral
Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington:
University of Indiana Press, 2001).
11 Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication, in The Anti-Aesthetic:
Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York: New Press, 1998),
146.
12 Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science
Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993).
13 Quoted in Schmidt, Thats All, Folks.
14 David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Cultural Change (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 192.
15 Kevin Brownlow, The Parades Gone By ... (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1968), 283.
16 Quoted in Goldman, Dede on Digital.
17 Nick T. Spark, Working Out the Bugs: An Interview with Pixars Lee
Unkrich, Supervising Film Editor of A Bugs Life, Motion Picture Editors
Guild Magazine 20, no. 1 (January-February 1999), http://www.editorsguild
.com/newsletter/JanFeb99/int_unkrich_bugs_life.html.
18 Danae Clark, Negotiating Hollywood: The Cultural Politics of Actors Labor
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995); Michael Denning (with
Holly Allen), Whos Afraid of Big Bad Walt? Disneys Radical Cartoonists, in The Cultural Front (New York: Verso, 1997), 40322.
19 Joyce Nelson, Sultans of Sleaze: Public Relations and the Media (Toronto:
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
269
Between the Lines Press, 1989), 96124; John Allen, Post-Industrialism and
Post-Fordism, in Modernity and Its Futures, ed. Stuart Hall, David Held, and
Tony McGrew (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1992), 169220.
Toby Miller, et al., Global Hollywood (London: BFI Publications, 2001) and
Global Hollywood 2 (London: BFI Publications, 2005).
Quoted in Kamal Al-Solaylee, More Than Guns for Hire, Globe and Mail, 6
January 2003, R1.
Quoted in Andre Mayer, Studio Builders Do Boffo Box Office, Globe and
Mail, 10 December 2002, B17.
Quoted in Cathy Carlyle, Discussing Policies on Canadian Film-making at
York, Gazette (York University), 4 April 2001, 1.
Quoted in Schmidt, Thats All, Folks.
Brenda Longfellow, The Red Violin, Commodity Fetishism and Globalization, Canadian Journal of Film Studies 10, no. 2 (fall 2001): 19.
Peter Morris, Embattled Shadows: A History of Canadian Cinema, 18951939
(Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1978).
Quoted in Al-Solaylee, More Than Guns for Hire.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The
MarxEngels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton,
1978), 482.
14 Screening the Call: Cell Phones, Activism, and

the Art of Connection
ki rs ty robertson
As at any other symphony concert, the sounds of coughing, shuffling

feet, and creaking chairs greeted the opening of a September 2001 performance at the Brucknerhaus Auditorium in Linz, Austria. Audience
members took their seats, the lights dimmed, and a pre-concert hush
fell over the crowd. The silence was suddenly broken by the sound of a
cell phone, ringing somewhere in the theatre. However, the familiar
noise of interruption was greeted not with hushes, but with a second
ringing telephone, and then another, until eventually a symphony of
two hundred mobile phones filled the auditorium. Dialtones, a coproduction of artist Golan Levin with the 2001 Ars Electronica Festival,
was a large-scale telesymphony concert performance, produced
through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audiences own mobile phones, each of which had been registered before
the concert and given a specific ring tone that could then be conducted
by the techno-musicians on-stage.1 Part symphony, part artwork, and
part social commentary, Dialtones can be read not only as a playful
reworking of the ring tone, but also as a way of rethinking the cell
phone as a tool of community formation and mutuality. By directing
our attention to the unexplored musical potential of a ubiquitous modern appliance, write the artists, Dialtones inverts our understandings
of private sound, public space, electromagnetic etiquette, and the fabric
of the communications network which connects us.2
By presenting a radical reworking of the cellular, the anti-social and
the dialogic (as opposed to polylogic) aspects of mobile phone use, performances such as the telesymphony instead generate playful adaptations of social communication, questioning any solely instrumental
understanding of the use of cell phones. In this paper, I use a number of
Cell Phones, Activism, and the Art of Connection
271
performative art/activist works to ask how mobile phones might be

used as an activist tool within expanding networks of global capitalism
and neoliberalism. In order to do so, I argue for an understanding of
cell phones that takes into account both their productive communicative potential as well as their material production in order to posit an
activism that takes place within the very zones of overlap and negotiation created by the spread of capitalism and the imaginaries of contemporary society.
As their use proliferates across the globe, cell phones have become at
once machines that create invisible threads weaving together the
(apparently) seamless space of global capitalism, and also the opposite
a technology of caesura and of interruption in the seeming inevitability of global integration. Mobile phones are both participators and
negotiators; they are, if we are to believe the numerous pundits, economists, and futurists, the tools, the mouthpieces, of a new, constantly
connected, globally interacting society. However, the outward transcendence of a (global) sociality based on networking and connection
depends exponentially on the material elements of communications
technology, that is, the hardware necessary to create an illusion of ubiquitous (invisible) communications. The manufacture, use, and disposal
of cell phones shadow the path of global communications and, I suggest, often act as a haunting, an absent-presence, in the use of mobile
technologies. Through the history of the manufacture of cell phones
runs a vector that connects the frenetic global circulations of commodities with the vast networks of communications, as well as the potential
for both radical activism and also environmental destruction.
The sociologist Manuel Castells wrote in 1996: Our society is constructed around flows of capital, flows of technology, flows of organizational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols. Flows are not
just one element of the social organization; they are the expression of
processes dominating our economic, political and symbolic life.3
Focusing on the role played by new technologies in the economic
restructuring of the 1980s, Castells describes the globalized world as a
space of fluidity wherein global information networks restructure not
only economies but also social life. From above and from below, electronic, informational, and communicational flows integrate the globe
through a distributed and reticulated global network. From the postFordist capitalist economy to the anti-capitalist movement of movements that defined alter-globalization protest, the circulation of information has been essential to recent imaginings of globalization. And,
272 Kirsty Robertson
perhaps not surprisingly, one of the essential tools creating and maintaining the global flows that underlie the network is the mobile phone.
Used by both activists and consumer capitalists, and increasingly
available across global lines of wealth and poverty, the cell phone has
prompted revolutions, invented new languages and literacies, produced wars, transformed the sonic environment of the late twentieth
century, formed new communities, encouraged new art for(u)ms, led to
an increased jostling for supremacy in space, altered the choreography
of people in urban environments, changed landscapes, and promoted
new forms of communication. Though a tiny gadget, the cell phone is a
life-altering prosthetic. To see it as such is also to rethink ideas of public
space in terms not of concrete gathering places but also of fluid social
fields that constantly shift and re-form. It demands, in other words, a
powerful rethinking of the public sphere through ideas of confluence,
vectors, trajectories, constantly transforming mutualities, and communities. The question then becomes whether such fluidity, such choice,
and such speed lead to inertia or to potential.
Appropriating the polysemic use of the word screen in the realm of
cell phones and communications, this paper suggests that not only do
mobile phones act as a screen, obscuring the current inequalities of
neoliberalism through a conflation of communication and freedom, but
they also provide a performative canvas for new social roles, collectivities, and art forms. I suggest that it is this very multivalency that opens
the discussion for possible new types of activism located within the
space of global flows of technology, capital and communication, creative industries, and knowledge economies. To make this clearer, in a
connected world, what spaces are opened up that might not even have
been recognized as resistant? In the realm of global networked power,
surely there are meandering traces of resistance that belong neither to
the traditional dichotomy of capitalism and Marxism nor to the
exhausted traditional left-wing critique. Refusing to choose between
the pathways of transcendent communications or material commodity,
I posit the in-betweenness of cell phone use as a place of potential, one
that balances and questions the complex and fragmented spaces of contemporary capitalism.
[ntrdctn]
In the opening chapter of his book Constant Touch, Jon Agar comes into
direct contact with the absent-presence of the material history of con-
273
temporary communications technology when he takes a hammer to his

cell phone. With his phone in pieces, Agar traces the history of engineering, design, and microprocessing behind the ultra-small secondgeneration (2G) phone he has just smashed, arguing that within the
detritus there is a new global politics [that] can be found among the
dust.4
Agar reveals the global passages of goods that had previously been
hidden by the plastic casing of his phone. His act of destruction exposes
nickel in the batteries from Chile, microprocessor chips and circuitry
from North America, plastic casings and liquid in the LCD made from
petroleum products from the Middle East, Texas, Russia, and the North
Sea, and plastic and moulding from Taiwan. Assembled in factories
around the world, and coordinated in corporate headquarters in Northern Europe, Korea, Japan, and New York, the cell phone is revealed as a
global gadget.5 At each stop both the emancipatory and the destructive
aspects of the mobile phone can be unwrapped the ability to communicate across distance in areas without landlines, to transfer money for
those without bank accounts, to call a doctor in an emergency, and to
keep in touch at prices accessible even to the poor contrasts starkly with
the working conditions and exposure to carcinogenic and mutagenic
toxins used at Mexican maquiladora factories in the production of
mobile communications technologies, and the environmental destruction wrought by discarded units.
As Agar continues his dissection of the phone, he notes capacitors
that regulate voltage and store energy made from tantalum, a metal
found in Canada, Australia, and Africa. A little-known material before
its use in cell phones, columbite-tantalite, known as coltan, now has a
skyrocketing price on the commodities market, combined with a shadowy history of extraction. Tantalum is mined in the northeast region of
the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), scene of a civil war that
has seen tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands displaced
in a conflict waged in part over mineral rights on the disputed borders
between Uganda, Rwanda, and the Congo.6 Profits from coltan fund
the war, while a world both in and out of touch with the conflict in the
DRC demands more, leading to soaring prices, which in turn exacerbate the fighting.7 Caught in the middle are great ape populations in the
area. Dependent upon intact forest regions, such activities as mining,
forestry, and hunting have decimated great ape populations by up to 90
percent in less than a decade, leaving only 3,000 animals alive.8 In this
circle of destruction and war, exacerbated by miners, militias, and
European forestry companies, the mobile phone is the tool of communication that keeps the bushmeat hunters on top of the location of both
animals and police, the warring factions in conflict, and the often illegal
trade of coltan in operation.9
The forgetting of the plight of the apes is echoed in the factory conditions where mobile phones are assembled. The demand for more
phones, and the promise of constant progress, instant newness, and
rapid obsolescence, create conditions wherein technological devices are
often built in less-than-ideal conditions, in the low-wage and tax-free
havens of global factories often divested of direct linkage to their corporate parents. Even more so than computers, cell phones as fashion statement, technological gadget, and mobile communications device have
their obsolescence built triply in. As such, their evolution as gadgets
overshadows and erases the global passages through which their manufacture takes them. Rather than prompting a call for politically and
environmentally cleaner components to cell phones, the plight of the
great apes, the war in the Congo, or the conditions of manufacture are
largely erased from discussions of cell phone use and innovation.
These stark contrasts are not uncommon in neoliberal systems,
where, as outlined by George Ydice and others, profits are tied up in
wealth creation the granting of property status to what had before
been inviolate, intangible, and outside of commodity status.10 Part of
the fully integrated network described above by Castells is the growth,
since the 1980s, of international trade, the expansion of direct foreign
investment, and the (intangible) stock, bond, and currency markets.
Combined with the proliferation of international trading bodies (such
as the WTO and the IMF), and international trade agreements, the transnational governance of capital is collapsed into an intricate global system of regulatory bodies that act at both national and transnational
levels.
Where knowledge, software, and experience can be characterized as
property, and capitalism is increasingly tied up in the transcendental
flows of information production, the plight of 3,000 apes becomes
increasingly difficult to imagine. Factory workers and apes do not
figure except in that their very tangibility seems somehow less real than
the movement of information. In other words, the collapse of space and
time promised by globalization is far from inevitable, and, in fact, the
fluidity that comes as part of a networked system seems rather to
flow inexorably around that which might halt its passage. That which
is most tangible, such as ape populations and factories, somehow
275
becomes virtual. It is not so much that they do not matter as that in a

lexicon that presents an object (phone) as already made when it arrives
in the hands of its user, all nodes on the chain of the phones existence
to that point cease to exist except as the virtual accessed only with a
hammer and research.
It is perhaps not surprising then that the cell phone consumes its own
material history even among activists using cell phones to organize
alter-globalization, anti-war, and environmental protests, production
remains largely effaced. Rather, it is its productive capacities that tend
to interest activists how might cell phones be used to forward a struggle? Rather than focusing a criticism on this politics of contradiction,
instead, I suggest that it is this very mutability, and the stories of
hardship that it silently carries with it, that makes the cell phone as
prosthetic, as wearable technology, a potentially embodied tool in an
ongoing power struggle in which the boundaries are becoming increasingly diffuse. Though the links between production and use of cell
phones remain largely effaced, when these links are made, activists will
have at their disposal a particularly rich and layered tool with which to
question and challenge the ever-adaptable status quo. The first step
here might be play. How have artists and activists used play to refashion the cell phone as a technology of tangible interpersonal connection,
and, in turn, how might this be used to open new spaces of opposition?
The Nomadic City
Ideas of mobilization bring up notions not only of the global movement
and exchange of goods but also of the flneur in the city. Moving
through the city space, observing the passing of life, the flneur has traditionally been imagined as the pastime of a privileged male class, possessing money, leisure time, and comfort with the public space of the
city. Though the flneur is primarily associated with the nineteenth century Walter Benjamin, for example, observed that the unfocused
longing for an unexpected (erotic) encounter gave way by the end of
the century to the fragmented experience of the passer-by11 ideas of
mobility and of sensing in the city can be rethought through the use of
the mobile phone. It is these new solitary and collective spaces of possibility that interest Adriana de Souza e Silva, who writes, with the aid
of nomadic technology devices, virtual social communities, in which
members do not occupy the same contiguous space, now emerge in
physical spaces.12 In this context, cell phones are active, creative, and
productive, generating new social communities. In other words, what

is important here is perhaps less the transcendent communications
across space than the way in which mobile technologies can also be
used to bring together real people in real space. Pointing to ImaHima, a
program that causes ones cell phone to beep every time a user in a
buddy list is in the area, de Souza e Silva notes:
Virtual communities have often been studied as narrative places in which
users create collective non-linear stories, and build up environments
solely via text. In the first decade of the 21st century, I shall risk to say that
cyberspace is gone. The idea of a virtual world, a simulated space, completely disconnected from our physical environment, is challenged by the
emergence of mobile technology devices, such as cell phones.13
The mobile phone, suggests de Souza e Silva, brings about the creation
of narrative and imaginary spaces, nomadic interfaces that actually
heighten the awareness of physicality when dealing with digital
space.14 The flneur is no longer a solitary creature but is connected to
others through a logic that can be described as anti-binary, that is, both
embodied and disembodied, both material and transcendent.
Encouraging both community and individual spaces of reflection
and collectivity, the mobile phone is a perception machine, an auditory,
visual device that situates the subject as embodied, as immanent. In the
following section, I enter these two perceptive realms in greater depth
the cell phone as both a prosthetic ear and eye and, through an analysis of several art works specifically using the mobile phone, suggest
how they might extend the perceiving body through and into space as
a way of encouraging community formation. I will then return at the
end of the paper to discuss how the history of the cell phones manufacture might be made material through the work of activist and artist
groups, thus bringing together the threads of this argument.
[da na na na, da na na na, da na na na na]
The ringing cell phone introduces a forced intimacy in the city an
intrusion into half conversations. Cultural critic Sadie Plant talks about
a certain collectivity maintained by the ringing phone everyone wants
to answer it, everyone recognizes the sound, and reaches out for it
across space, only to be apprehended at the last moment.15 The reaction
to the ringing phone described by Plant is a moment full of potential.
277
How might this potential come to fruition? Artists involved in Sale

Away created a mechanical orchestra of vacuum cleaners playing flute,
organ and brass, rattling kitchen mixers, buzzing ventilators, radio
playing toy trains, wobbling jigsaws, dancing tumble dryers, [and]
humming refrigerators that could be played by people dialling in
with their cell phones. Shown in Osnabrueck, Germany, in 2004, Sale
Away, like Dialtones, was put together to engage pedestrians and viewers in a different sonic space. But in this case the action was not purely
affect, but was based on a participatory engagement designed to connect passers-by with the people around them, thereby directing attention away from the commodities in the shopping centre where the piece
was shown, and towards each other.16 The cell phone as symphony creates a sonic web that relies largely on collective participation to bring
people together. How then might mobile technologies be used to move
the collectivities into action?
During the 2003 protest gatherings against the Republican National
Convention in Manhattan, organizers made extensive use of mobile
phones and text messaging to organize protesters, to avoid violent confrontations, and to keep track of hot points in the activity. As in the Philippine demonstrations in 2001 that relied on mass text messaging to
organize protests and actions, eventually resulting in the ousting of
Philippine President Joseph Estrada, in New York, text messaging
became a way of organizing instant support and seemingly spontaneous protests.17 Combined with mobile reporting, hacking, and collective organization, Moport.com was an attempt to put the media back in
the hands of the people. By phoning in their reports, text messaging
ideas and events, and sending pictures taken by digital phones to the
central website, Moport became a centre for the reconfiguration of the
events of the National Convention protests in activist terms.18
It is an idea of speaking out, of reaching out, that speaks, for many, to
the power of interpersonal communications of mobile phones. The
titles of two recent books, for example Perpetual Contact and Constant
Touch suggest a sonic tactility that turns the cell phone inside out, from
gadget to microphone. One Free Minute, a mobile sculpture designed to
allow for instances of anonymous public speech, uses a cell phone that
can be called, connecting people for exactly one minute to a 200-watt
amplifier and speaker.19 Outside of the surveillance and tracking that
goes hand in hand with cell phone use, participants can either call live,
when the sculpture is in situ, or can leave a message on a trans-global
answering machine. The artists behind One Free Minute write that its
intent was to investigate how public discourse has been changed by

technology. Arguing that cellular phones bring private space into the
public through overheard conversation, One Free Minute break[s] the
soundscape of public space with unpredictable acts of improvised,
anonymous public speech. Outside of billing, outside of speech regulated by pay-by-the-minute, the sculpture allows anonymous callers to
control public soundscapes, if only for a minute. Here the city is screen
onto which are projected the thoughts of the populace. The cell phone
encourages the seeing of the city as something that can be changed
with the cell phone, the city becomes mutable.
It is a take on this idea that comes up in the Canadian [murmur]
project. Walking through the city, passers-by might spot a small green
sign, shaped like an ear, with a phone number written on it. Calling the
number from a mobile phone, participants are greeted with a recorded
message telling a story of the history of the site. Occasionally funny,
sometimes tragic, the stories of the [murmur] project invest the spaces
of the city with the memories of those who have been there before. The
stories grant texture to the city spaces; they are gaps in the smooth
facade of capitalism.
In a slightly more technologically sophisticated project, URBANtells,
a project by Steve Bradley, Joe Reinsel, and James Rouvelle, participants
use a specially designed digi-diviner, a handheld cell phonelike
device that allows users to explore neighbourhoods on foot, collecting
and listening to recorded experiences of the city. An evolving database
collects layers of embedded histories and experience that define the
urban experience.20 Recordings of residents, street sounds, and historians are mixed with recitations, music, and processed sound, addressing
the complex layers of personal and collective.21 Using the diviner, participants can capture sound clips and still images and write texts, which
can be plugged into the database, each participant adding another layer
to the urban environment. Arranged on layered maps in the database,
users can either follow the directions of a predecessor, mapping their
own sights and sounds onto the city, or create their own sonic spaces.
URBANtells and [murmur] are both insular projects they both
emphasize the solitary, flneur-like nature of the cell phone user. Like
the use of mobiles at social and protest gatherings, in maintaining anarchist communities and long-distance relationships, cell phones can
encourage the maintenance of already established links and collectivities. Through their use they encourage the reaffirmation of mutualities
and the performance of community.
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[Screening the Call]

Third-generation (3G) cell phones are increasingly less about talking
and more about images. From the eerie, soundless shots of the London
Underground after the 2005 bombings, to warnings on change-room
doors that cell phones are not allowed, to photoblogs and snapshots,
the mobile phone as camera has opened a whole new level of access to
art making and sharing. According to the prospectus for a California
exhibition Cell-Outs and Phonies, As the digital world grows to encompass all aspects of our life, we see the gadgets of our day-to-day existence evolving into expressive art mediums. The accessibility of
photography and digital filmmaking through cell phones, according to
the exhibition curators, erases boundaries between art and technology,
between amateur and professional. Opening with a performance of
ring tones by the German experimental group Super Smart, and followed by continuous screenings of cell phone videos, Cell-Outs and Phonies moved the phone into the gallery, not as an object of design, but as
a tool of artistic emancipation.22
These projects bridge a fascination with the new and a limited
engagement with politics. freeSTYLE, a project by Dana Karwas, for
example, turns cell phone text messaging into spoken word and customized graphics, recreating text messaging as visual hip-hop. Mobility is constantly defining, recycling, disposing, and reinterpreting the
idea of identity, she writes. Cell phones offer an extension of and a
portal into ones own identity. freeSTYLE exposes the very conscious
connection to ones mobile identity by bringing the sounds and visions
of mobility to the edges of digital space.23
Thus far, then, we have seen projects that highlight identity and
group formation. Collectives can have a great deal of power. In a recent
text, visual culture scholar Irit Rogoff talks of the potential for collectivity outside of prescribed cultural roles (for example, viewer at the art
gallery, listener at the concert). Through participation, viewing art
becomes about the relationships between viewers, even at an unconscious level. Rogoff argues that in these potential mutualities lies a new
definition of community, a new we that obfuscates identity for ephemeral but often strong collectivities. For Rogoff, the creation of ephemeral
bonds through the often unconscious meetings of people offer a way of
constructing a connectivity with revolutionary potential for rethinking
the relations between and among people, from the end product of cell
phone art, through links back to the disrupted habitat of the great apes
Fig 14.1 An image from the Green Arts Barn event, taken from the SEED
Collectives online gallery at http://www.seedcollective.ca. Audiences use
their cell phone keypads to grow a collective virtual forest.
in the Congo. These links, however, remain largely unexplored, with

the production of cell phones largely hived off from its productive
capacities.
It is with a project that I believe makes this relationship tangible that
I would like to end this discussion of cell phone art. In 2004, artists of
the Canadian SEED collective came together with Canadian Film Centres Habitat New Media Lab to put together SEED, a project that
explores the convergence of rich media and wireless technology in the
creation of a collaborative and evolving work of art.24 Using their cell
phones to dial a particular number, participants are given a seed,
which is grown through the choice of keys on the pad of the phone. Participants are given the choice of tree they want to plant and the ability
to change its texture and colour. In the final project, the participants
trees come together to create a virtual, colourful, individual, yet communal forest (fig. 14.1).
281
The SEED Project, to my mind, manifests the potential of cell phones

as tools of collectivity. People work together to grow a colourful forest,
often unaware of the participation of other viewers. The affective relations noted by Rogoff are here visualized in the forest of virtual trees.
The SEED Collective has also worked hard to bring their project into a
tangible reality and has turned profits and donations into real trees. As
a first step at bringing together the productive capacities of the cell
phone with discussion over urban decay and environmental destruction, the SEED Projects planting of actual trees in urban environments
speaks to the potential of artists working at this juncture to bring about
real change. As charities have begun collecting and recycling cell
phones, this has become an area rich in potential for activists, artists,
and mobile phone users. Although the future of such activism, of the
precarious situation of factory workers, and of the great apes remains
uncertain, these links are waiting to be made.
Epilogue: The Silent Cell Phone
As mobile phones have progressed from first through third generations, the search for the killer app, the application that will get all
users to upgrade their phones, has been just that a search that has
wrought destruction on a variety of areas of the globe. But the cell
phone has no master narrative, no single tale of manufacture, development, and use. In its unpredictability lies its potential, and as I hope I
have shown here, the health, environmental, and surveillance concerns
raised by some observers are not the concerns of Luddites but of users
heavily invested in the social circumstances created by mobile phones.
As an example of how neoliberalism can be opened up through the use
of its own developments, the cell phone has a mutability that allows it
to create an always diffuse and always open theorization of its own
existence.
As an example, one might look to the future of cell phone and mobile
technologies. As cell phones are adapted into soft fabrics, clothing, and
belts that can be worn right next to the body, clothing is also manufactured to protect against the low-level radiation brought about by the
use of cell phones. The answer here is not to question the uptake of cell
phones in general, but to question how they might be used. And for
those for whom the cell phone is at best a loud annoyance, there might
yet be hope. Developed largely by NASA, a silent cell phone might one
day be on the market. Put together largely for use by stroke victims and
for covert military operations, the silent phone picks up subvocal
speech, transmitting and translating it to a listener.25 The noise of the

city might yet change again ... this time to one of silence. [click].
NOTES
1 Dialtones: A Telesymphony, Flong, http://www.flong.com/telesymphony/.
2 Ibid.
3 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996),
41213.
4 Jon Agar, Constant Touch: A Global History of the Mobile Phone (Cambridge:
Icon Books, 2003), 912. See also Kenneth Gergen, The Challenge of Absent
Presence, in Perpetual Contact: Mobile Communication, Private Talk, Public Performance, ed. James E. Katz and Mark Aakhus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 227.
5 Agar, Constant Touch, 14.
6 Ibid., 13. See also Susanna Paasonen, Mutation and Money: Arguing with
Sadie Plant on the Mobile, Horizon 4, http://www.horizonzero.ca/textsite/
touch.php?is=4&file=15&tlang=2.
7 Ibid.
8 EcoISP, Species on the Brink, http://www.ecoisp.com/species20.asp.
9 Ibid. Determined to keep their hands free of a bloody diamond-sized scandal, companies such as Nokia, Motorola, and Ericsson buy already-made
capacitors from manufacturers who must obtain coltan from shadowy intermediaries.
10 George Ydice, The Expediency of Culture: Uses of Culture in the Global Era
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 194.
11 Walter Benjamin, quoted in Katherine Sykora, Merchandise Temptress: The
Surrealistic Enticements of the Display Window Dummy, in Shopping: A
Century of Art and Consumer Culture, ed. Christoph Grunenberg and Max
Hollein (London: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002), 130.
12 Adriana de Souza e Silva, Are Cell Phones New Media? Trace: On Line
Writing Centre, http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/Opinion/index.cfm?article=121.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Sadie Plant, On the Mobile: The Effects of Mobile Phones on Social and
Individual Life, http://www.motorola.com/mot/doc/0/234_MotDoc.pdf.
16 Sale Away, Staalplaat Soundsystem, http://www.staalplaat.org/
sale_away.html.
283
17 New York Associated Press, The Latest Protest Tool: Texting, reblogged at
Rhizome.org, http://rhizome.org/thread.rhiz?thread=14421&page=1.
18 Ibid.
19 One Free Minute, http://www.onefreeminute.net/.
20 URBANtells, Joereinsel.org, http://www.joereinsel.org/urbantells/
index.htm.
21 Ibid.
22 Laura Merians, Cell-Outs and Phonies, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art,
http://www.lacda.com/exhibits/august.html.
23 Dana Karwas, freeSTYLE, The Suburb, http://www.dk22.com/suburb/
index.php?p=44.
24 SEED Collective, http://www.seedcollective.ca.
25 Stacey Young, Secret Speech Aid, ScienCentral News, 16 September 2005,
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?type=article&article_
id=218392411.
15 Immigrant Semiosis
l au r a u. ma rk s
On an autumn day in 2002, I visited the mountain home of some Lebanese friends. Worldly people and, fortunately for me, fluent in English,
they made pains to accommodate me to my unfamiliar setting. Indeed,
the surroundings were glorious: scrub-clad mountains descending to
valleys thick with olive trees and, further, plunging to the cement factories just south of Tripoli and then to the sea. The mountain breeze, the
scents of frangipani and roasting eggplant, the clatter of jackhammers
at the construction site across the valley, the metallic Bach jingling from
mobile phones they all stimulated my senses and my imagination. I
clambered around their orchard, sinking my toes in the crumbly red
earth, examining the growth of olives, and also, for my friends are keen
importers, kiwi fruit and persimmons. On my return, one of my hosts
said, Are you making discoveries? [with a laugh of recognition] The
Discovery Channel. Later, as the sun began to cast long shadows in the
orchard, another friend pointed to an animal on the opposite hill. Its a
fox. [laugh] The Fox Channel.
Which of my experiences that day were my own, and which came to
me pre-formed? An ancient valley bustling with the construction of
postCivil War returnees: do I experience this with my senses or my
intellect? Is a kiwi vine in Lebanon a plant or a sign? Is it a fox or a
Fox? That beautiful afternoon was rich for me with affective experience. But much of it came to me already encoded in concepts that were
not mine, nor ours, alone. And thats a Lebanese mountain: what of the
billion banal urban milieus impregnated with corporate mediation, like
riding a bus through streets thick with signage, advertising posters
overhead, Old Spice and CK One wafting from fellow passengers, cell
phones jingling bastardized Bach? In the age of hypermediation, how
can we have our own experience?
Immigrant Semiosis
285
Two accelerations have occurred in the last 150 years. First, the global
flow of capital and information has accelerated. Second, and necessitated by the first, the translation of embodied experience into disembodied information has sped up. If, as I will argue, what makes us
human is our ability to participate fully in the process of mediation,
these accelerations appear to have a dehumanizing effect. As a result of
these two speedings-up, corporate interests have built a faux sociality
in which meanings look like they are the product of democratic human
communication but they are not. Corporate meaning is imposed, at a
fractal level of detail, on every level of life. Even the meaning of individual, embodied experience appears to be increasingly colonized by
corporate culture. My Lebanese mountain anecdote hints at the way
corporate branding and other forms of predigested experience permeate the very life of the senses. Other examples abound, like the interesting recent phenomenon that youths who communicate via SMS
messages on their mobile phones are starting to grow unprecedentedly
large thumbs with extra nerve endings. So I expand my initial question
into a series of questions that structure this essay: Where can we find
individual experience, at the levels both of embodied sensation and of
thought, in the flow of mediated images in which we are enmeshed?
How can our experience be meaningful? How can this process be truly
social, as opposed to the false sociality by which corporate interests
invade our very bodies? Are there people especially capable of immediate experience?
Further along I will suggest that indeed there are such people, who
have no choice but to experience firsthand while the rest of us languish
in the sweet suffocation of corporate interpellation. These are people
who, falling out of official information grids, must forage on the precarious shoals of real experience. In particular, they are immigrants. Not
those immigrants who are cautiously solicited, with their masters
degrees, marketable skills, and lack of dependents, by the wealthy
countries of the West.1 The agents that I privilege in this essay are those
who make the crossing out of dogged desperation, immigrants who are
unacknowledged and generally illegal. These are Algerians who, having spent their savings on fake papers, smuggle themselves into Spain
to work in construction; Afghanis who survive the Channel Tunnel
crossing clinging to the underside of the Eurostar; Nigerian women
who pay extortionate amounts to a sponsor to become prostitutes; Mexicans who cross the U.S. border by foot through the desert to fill the
labour market for fruit pickers and hotel cleaners. Illegal immigrants
are not only an essential and disavowed source of cheap labour from
286 Laura U. Marks
Parma to Phoenix but also, I will argue, the twenty-first centurys best
hope for experience that is immediate, communicable, and meaningful.
As part of the process, these agents of social meaning reinvent popular
media, such as the Internet and the mobile phone, as networks that
offer sustenance, exchange, and when necessary disappearance
from the grid.
To analyse the apparent problems with the speed of mediated information, I rely in the following on two philosophers writing in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the French Henri Bergson and
the American Charles Sanders Peirce. Why these two? Bergson and
Peirce, both of whose research was informed by contemporary experiments in psychology, analysed acutely the rich process of embodied,
multisensory perception. Both attempted to define a process by which
individuals, through their attentive perception of the world, come up
with rich and reliable information about it. Interestingly, both philosophers were defining these capable and relatively autonomous subjects
of perception just when European and North American societies were
being pervaded by mass-produced image media: photography, advertising, and cinema. Industrial production and mass media were bringing into being a new kind of person, an attentive yet distracted subject
susceptible to instrumental control.2 Just when the new field of psychology was yielding data on perception, the subject of perception was
changing. Thus, their efforts to describe the human subjects of attentive
recollection (for Bergson) and the semiotic process (for Peirce) have a
certain anxious, hortatory, at times even elegiac quality. Yet, for these
reasons, Bergson and Peirce provide useful models of a sensuous and
knowledgeable subject at the beginning of the hypermediated age. The
complementarity of their thought is attested by their mercurial union in
the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, which informs my own thinking. I
return more frequently to Peirce in this essay, for reasons I will explain
later.
Let me sketch, through a Peircean lens, the relationship between perception and meaning in the information age. For Peirce, the semiotic
process (or, to use his term, semiosis) is a rich and constant process of
mediation, a continuum between impression, perception, and thought.
This life-giving process invites us, indeed demands us, to feel and sense
(Firstness), to distinguish among these feelings and act accordingly
(Secondness), and to synthesize and generalize (Thirdness). Everything
in the world, from crystals to hard drives (to crystals in hard drives),
takes part in this process, a flow so continuous that it is difficult to iso-
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287
late its separate moments. What makes us humans superior to other

beings in the process of semiosis is that we are not only embodied but
also have unique imaginative powers.3 What makes us superior to our
technologies in the process of semiosis is that we have an unconscious,
in the sense that the majority of what goes on in our minds-bodies
never enters the narrow light beam of our consciousness. In other
words, we are rich in the preconscious field of Firstness, as well as in
the synthesizing, symbolizing powers of Thirdness.
Peircean scholar Floyd Merrell suggests that we may characterize different eras according to different relationships among Peirces categories of First, Second, and Third.4 I suggest that our current era, the era of
information, is dominated by Secondness, since attention, rather than
either raw sensation or synthesis, is the ability called on most often.
Nowadays many perceptions arrive to us with ready-made instructions
for their use. Traffic signals ask only to be obeyed. Computer games
reward quick reflexes. The logo of a brand of ramen noodles elicits salivation in some people. Such perceptions rest in the realm of Secondness, as described by Peirce: they prompt us neither to be open to the
broad expanse of perceptible experience, nor to synthesize, but to act.
Also they are fairly accessible to consciousness: if we are not aware at
the moment that certain images make us salivate, click an icon, or slam
on the brakes, it is easy to retrace the process a moment later.
Clearly something is lost in the speed of this semiotic handover. Or
rather, two things: the ability to receive our own impressions (Firstness)
and the ability to make our own judgments (Thirdness). If experience
consists of the lively flow between impression, perception, action, and
reflection, then especially for those of us living in postindustrial,
information-dependent societies these breaks in the semiotic flow
make it difficult for us to have our own experience.
In the following I will take a look at these two bottlenecks in the
semiotic flow, what comes First and what comes Third in experience. I
will ask Bergson as well as Peirce what we gain from these aspects of
experience, ask why information culture is weak in them, and suggest
ways we and our media might revive the rich and ceaseless flow of
experience. If this sojourn has a motto, it is, Take back the flow!
Firstness
The moment at which the world first brushes up against our senses and
feelings is precious. It is in the movement between First and Second
288 Laura U. Marks
that a metallic jingle jolts me, before I identify it as a personalized cell

phone ring. It is here that a sharp, boundaryless pain briefly overwhelms me, before I can identify its source as the piece of broken glass
I stepped on. (People who live with chronic pain hover closer to the
First end of the continuum, and their suffering reminds us not to
romanticize precognitive states.) Research in perceptual psychology
suggests that our senses receive about one million times as much information as our consciousness processes.5 In other words, what takes
place First is the property of our sense impressions, which is only very
occasionally accessible to our conscious selves.6 (More puzzlingly, it is
in this movement of Firstness that joy transports us before we identify
its source. The feeling of joy, Peirce says, is already a predicate: This is
delicious.)7 I have referred to the movement between First and Second because we cannot grasp the fleetingness of Firstness in itself: as
soon as we perceive something, it is distinguished from other things
and ceases to exist for us in itself. Firstness endures only for a flash. But
a sense of the flow from feeling to action, or First to Second, is the wellspring of human experience.
The semiotic process is one of constant mediation, but we humans
have also developed numerous technologies that carry out mediation
for us. When people worry that information culture is creating a population of disembodied subjects, they are reacting to the appearance that
signs appear ready-made and do not need to be felt, distinguished, and
interpreted in the semiotic process. As Tor Nrretranders points out,
the so-called information culture is actually poor in information flow.
What we receive from our computers, traffic signals, newspaper headlines, and so on, is not as rich in Firstness as what we receive from
exploring olive groves or stepping on glass.
Information necessarily bypasses the step of Firstness. Its creature,
the computer, begins life at Secondness, acting on the basis of distinctions that have already been made by someone else. The computers
Secondness begins at the digital level. There its signs consist, to use
Peircean terminology, of a representamen 0 or 1, an object, off or on; and
an interpretant: the convention that 0 always indicates off, 1 on. This
sign in turn becomes a representamen for a more sophisticated sign.
Thus at a higher degree of complexity exist signs whose representamen
is an algorithm, their object a calculation, and their interpretant a guarantee that this algorithm always produces this calculation. Innocent
enough exertions of control; we cannot have electrons spilling in the
guts of our computers, making calculations unreliable.8 It is at a higher
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289
level of complexity still that the pre-emption of Firstness in computerbased experience starts to feel coercive. When computer programs prescribe specific choices and make others inadmissible, identify certain
calculations as meaningful and have no tools for others, enjoin certain
actions and not others, we feel the cramp of no-Firstness. These decisions, of course, are not properties of computers themselves but reflect
the interests of their builders and investors.
The currently dominant branch of psychology, cognitive science,
tends to construct a model of human experience without Firstness,
insofar as it retroactively models consciousness on information processing.9 The reason cognitive science is hegemonic in academic and
corporate research now is that it offers a model of a human subject that
can act on quantified information, as a computer does, and thus can be
monitored, quantified, and directed as a computer can. So the reason
we in postindustrial societies are acting more like computers is not just
due to some general alienation but because the corporate interests that
want to understand and influence human behaviour are applying a
powerful model of human psychology based on information processing. We slam on the brakes, salivate on command, and click those
damned pop-up windows because corporations consult with cognitive
scientists whose computer-derived psychological model, if insulting to
the delicate infinity wed like to imagine is the human being, delivers
results.
We can trace the current fixation with information processing and,
concomitantly, with applied psychology to the nineteenth-century fascination with attention, which, according to Jonathan Crary, became a
central category for philosophy and the new field of psychology in the
latter quarter of that century. Attention, measured in fractions of a second by Wilhelm Wundt at the worlds first psychology laboratory at the
University of Leipzig in 1879,10 was, of course, a skill newly required for
the repetitive work of the assembly line. It meant narrowing the field of
perception adequately to concentrate on a given object, but not so much
as to become rapt in it. Although it was cultivated by industrialized
labour, Crary argues, attention became the privileged form of spectatorship for the new mass art of cinema. Thus the same form of cognitive,
reactive information processing came to dominate both work and leisure in the twentieth century. Indeed, Crary points out, Thomas Edison
saw his Kinetoscope not as a medium of entertainment so much as a
machine for the distribution of quantified and commodified information, along the lines of his earlier invention, the telegraph-stock ticker.11
290 Laura U. Marks
The implications of this history for early twenty-first-century perception, at least among us in the first world, are vivid. A century of practice
has moulded our perceptual processes to privilege Secondness, conscious perception, and attention. We have become very good at paying
attention to numerous parallel sources of information, whether working on computers, monitoring aircraft paths, telemarketing, or listening
to music on an iPod, sending text messages, walking, and drinking coffee. In terms of perceptual processes, leisure is just practice for work.
This divisive perceptual practice extends to less mediated activities,
like the commodified experience of quality time. In all these activities,
the narrow band of our semiotic process that is attentive consciousness
is hyper-stimulated. The moment of affect, of wonderment in the sensory brush with the world, of latency of Firstness is elided.
Yet information culture also introduces a new kind of Firstness into
experience. This is actually a condensed Thirdness; contemporary
media reintroduce processed information that arrives to our experience
as a First. What I might call Information-Firstness occurs in several
ways. A first way is by incorporating affect into instrumental goals.
Commercial media tend to introduce symbols of affect, which harness
the embodied response to the affection image.12 This kind of affection
image leads resolutely to action. Epic-action movie director James
Cameron insists, Adrenaline is not an emotion!13 but I think he protests too much. Harnessed affection images arouse bodily responses
that lead not inward but onward. Violent computer games employ the
conventions of splashing blood and the cries of the vanquished. Burger
King ads entice with the glistening beads of grease on a hamburger.
Commercial porn employs conventions for arousal the well-lit genital
close-up, the sound loop of ecstatic moaning. These conventions appeal
to our conscious attention, and we respond to them as we do to symbols. They operate in the relatively impoverished realm of pre-processed, pre-thought images; they only look like they are embodied. A
language that speaks our bodies from without, faux-affect is a powerful
tool of colonization.14
A more promising route back to First is through those media that
speak directly to our bodies without harnessing affect to an instrumental chain. This Firstness is not an end in itself but a beginning. As
Deleuze writes, Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn,
it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from
thought, life.15 The best way for us to experience our bodies stubbornness might be to fall asleep and dream, for there, when our bodies are
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291
incapable of acting, the waves of Firstness wash over our unconscious

perception. Similarly, our bodies are perhaps most engaged by movies
in which nothing much happens: lacking the usual demands upon our
attention, perhaps we daydream. Some media objects daydream for us,
declining to force these dreams along the path of instrumental meaning. And then, speedy movies that flood our bodies with adrenaline but
do not tell us how to interpret this feeling sublime movies also facilitate our embodied process of meaning-making. Beauty, horror, absurdity seem to lie on the surface of the work for their own sake.16 Bypassing cognition, they speak to our bodies, announcing our ignorance
and hinting at the possibility of knowledge, or better, of life.
The third way our information media reintroduce Firstness is the
most important if we are to appreciate the potential of information culture. The elision of Firstness characteristic of the information age is not
a reason to reject all media and go live in the olive grove. The new kinds
of experience afforded by hypermediation afford their own pleasure
and intellectual richness. To describe a third way that information
media arrives back to us as First, let me return to Peirces category of
Firstness.
Often what we receive as Firstness is already a condensed Third. The
olive tree arrives to me already encoded in my notions of agriculture, of
Mediterranean weather, of velvety texture and sharp odour. Even as I
engage with it sensuously, my initial approach is informed by prior
analysis and belief. These prior knowledges, like memory for Bergson,17 allow me to perceive more and learn more from the olive tree
than if I did not possess them. So with information media. Peirces concept of the Real, what strikes us as primary experience, is not only what
is material and sensuous. In his flexible semiotics, an idea can be primary material, as can a mediated image. What was Third for someone
for example a concept, a video image, or a seductive caress returns to
someone else as primary material, as First.
I have developed a Peircean triad to describe the status of the image
in information-capitalist society.18 It is Experience (1) : Information/
Capital (2) : Image (3). Briefly, I argue that, in information capitalism,
experience which comes First is selectively taken up by corporate and
state interests according to what is useful as Information or as Capital (a
brief consideration will reveal that they are practically the same thing).
This process yields Images (not just visual but perceptible in general)
that are not direct translations of Experience but selective crystallizations of Information and Capital. An example of such an Image is a char-
292 Laura U. Marks
acter from the Pokmon game craze, going strong since 1996. From the
experience of both game developers and children (First), Nintendos
canny investment and market research (Second) developed the intricate
game with its characters so attractive to children (Third). So the character Pikachu is not a visual image but an argument that this image will extract money from children (and their parents). The sign Pikachu is dense
with information, which in turn is dense with experience, although
these are special condensations developed with revenue in mind.
Luckily, though, the richness of Peircean semiosis is that Thirds
become, in turn, Firsts of a new and never-ending semiotic spiral. So
the Image, though it condenses within it information and experience
that may never be unpacked, still returns as a First, as raw material of
experience. The Pokmon phenomenon drove crazy parents and aunties (like me) who feared that their children were subsisting bug-eyed
in a predigested world composed on information gleaned by the corporation precisely in order to keep kids in thrall. But have you ever
watched a child draw Pikachu or another Pokmon character? There
you witness the translation of an image that is entirely Third into a
First, the world about to arise to perception, and a series of Seconds, as
the child selectively perceives the little figure, and a Third as she or he
draws it, ever so carefully, each crayon scrawl a considered judgment.
Every Third returns as a First, and each time differently.19
Are you not convinced that the Firstness of Pikachu is not as rich as
the Firstness of digging your toes in the soil under an olive tree? Bergson can help think through the relative wealth and poverty of these two
experiences. Bergson was anxious about photography and other readymade replacements for memory images.20 Attentive recollection, as
Bergson describes it, is like twinned buffet tables between which we
bound until deliciously surfeited, on one side, with the dishes of perception, and on the other, with the seasoning of memory.21 (Or, memory
is the dish and perception is the spice: maybe it depends on how old
you are.) But what if, to employ a rather disgusting image, each of these
tempting arrays is already predigested? For the philosopher of Matter
and Memory, the danger posed by the new mass media was that the circuit between perception and memory, crucial to the enrichment of each,
was closing.
That the objects of perception are becoming ever more homogeneous
for us in postindustrial, first-world societies is constantly being demonstrated with more or less cogency. What about the memory buffet table:
are our very memories also becoming more homogeneous? In some
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293
ways, yes. The example of Pokmon and other heavily scripted games
is only one of the ways children and even infants come up having experiences that are not theirs alone. Parents show alphabetic flash cards to
babes in the cradle; three-year-olds play with educational DVDs. It
would seem that to the extent that the experiences that form our memories are homogeneous, our memories will come to resemble each
other. And where is the subject then?
Yet I doubt that a heavily symbolic and logocentric early life deprives
people of rich experiences of Firstness. Children still play with their
excreta and fall into instructive mishaps in even the most antibacterial
home. The world is rich with primary stuff that exceeds our grasp of it
and our need to grasp it. To the extent that we still have bodies, we will
still be capable of unique experience, even in our interactions with
densely encoded media objects.
To summarize on an optimistic note: It does seem that we are still
capable of having our own experience in the information age. Increasingly encoded though it is, the world is still rich with Firstness, including the return to a First state of information itself.
But, to keep you reading, let me introduce a gloomy note. Recall that
in the model Ive introduced, information capital selectively adopts
those aspects of experience that it deems useful. It bypasses useless
Firstness, those aspects of experience, such as wiggling your toes in the
soil, that do not seem generative of information or money. Thus much
of what comes to us as Firstness in information media is filtered according to information-capitalist notions of what is meaningful. Meaning is
not determined individually, nor by communitarian, democratic
notions of value. This problem forces us along, like leaves in a gutter, to
that second semiotic bottleneck, what comes Third in experience.
Thirdness
Both Bergson and Peirce modelled a process of embodied thinking on a
fluid relation between the individual and the world. But for Bergson
this was a graciously privileged individual in a somewhat depopulated
world. Bergsons model of embodied perception is an ever-widening,
quasi-hermeneutic circuit in which perception calls up memory and
memory enriches and refines perception. It is a beautiful process, which
I experience occasionally and you probably do too. It requires a subject
with the leisure to discern and to remember, in order gradually to
develop knowledge about the world. But in the hypermediated age,
294 Laura U. Marks
whos got the time? Bergsons Marxist critics, Georg Lukcs and the
more sympathetic Walter Benjamin, argued that the time so precious to
Bergson, the time of perception and memory, is a time devoid of community and hence of history. Bergson in his conception of the dure
has become ... estranged from history, Benjamin wrote. The dure from
which death has been eliminated has the miserable endlessness of a
scroll. Tradition has been excluded from it.22 Similarly, Lukcs criticized Bergson for ignoring how capitalism distorts the experience of
time into a degrading, depersonalized passage.23 Memory without history, which for the Frankfurt School critics meant social history, is
depopulated. It provides a beautiful sanctuary in which to reflect and
recreate, but when power intervenes in the very experience of time,
memory can only helplessly hold up its hands (and halt, like a clock
whose hands are seized).
Peirce too had in mind an ideal subject of perception, a philosopherscientist who tests all his or her ideas in a rigorous and ongoing interaction with the world. But unlike Bergson, he was adamant that meaning
is produced in an ongoing process of social human interaction with the
world. Sociality is the source of meaning and the basis of the value of
thought. We observe the world, through abstraction produce statements about it, and test these statements. This practice, he argues,
occurs not in the individual alone. It is the community that guarantees
that the signs that circulate within it words, conventions, laws are
grounded in a democratic and scientific agreement as to their meaning
(this is Thirdness) in relation to real objects. As Peirce writes, a symbol,
once in being, spreads and moves among the peoples. In use and in
experience, its meaning grows.24 The value of a sign, then, is its ability
to be taken up, to germinate, to communicate.
Corporate signs are certainly taken up with great enthusiasm. The
fact that they are taken up differently each time gives these signs a certain vitality, about which Peirces semiotics are optimistic. To the extent
that the corporate meanings are taken up and circulated, collective
action by individuals on corporate signs constitutes a community. This
is the argument of studies of fan culture, which emphasize the point in
the semiotic flow whereby corporate Thirds return as collective Firsts.
Are Pokmon, Bach, and Fox transformed in their collective use? In
the first place, no. Insofar as our societies have erected practical barriers
to the transformation of their signs, including copyright law and the
application of anti-defamation laws, their signs cannot be freely taken
up. These barriers certainly impede the flow of living meaning. But it is
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295
not the main cause of the bottleneck, as lively bootleg cultures attest. If
we return to my example of the child drawing the Pokmon character,
this is a sort of taking up of a corporate sign that generates new meaning, on an individual level. A mobile phones tinny electronic riff on The
Goldberg Variations, infuriating though it may be to Bach aficionados,
makes that piece of music a new object: every return, by every listener,
slightly transforms it.25 If many people take up The Goldberg Variations
in similar ways, allowing it to summon them to duty or distraction on
mobile phones around the world, its meaning as a symbol grows and
changes.
But such transformations of corporate signs are not enough to guarantee that experience is meaningful. Peirce did not have much luck
with fan clubs. He placed his dearest hope in the cooperative action of
a community of students to ensure the gradual emergence of reliable
knowledge.26 What knowledge do these scholars produce? Not abstractions alone; not art; certainly not money. Their modest, disinterested
labour would generate ideas testable in the real world and describing
real outcomes. In the gradual, fallible, and collective process he
describes with loving minuteness, science would uncover objective
truths.27 The purpose of thought, Peirce argued, is to lead to habits of
action: what a thing means is simply what habits it involves.28
So the more important questions are, what meaning do we produce
in the ongoing transformation of corporate signs? What habits of action
result from this process? And (this is a difficult one for all but the most
hard-core Peircean) can they lead to objective truths?
Let us look for the meaning in the experience with which I began. Is
it a fox or a Fox? (Or, as Navajo elder Sam Yazzie asked, Will making
movies harm the sheep?)29 Live people seeing real foxes are transforming that sign according to their memory, as Bergson would say, and
building a new communal understanding of the sign fox, as Peirce
would say. What knowledges, what habits can the community of students develop from seeing a fox in light of the Fox Channel? Should we
shoot it? Feed it lettuce? Sit it in front of the TV with a nice cold arak?
Smug with our superior knowledge (weve seen a real fox), should we
go back to watching TV, but resistantly? (The latter is a term Peirce
would surely have disliked, for the purpose of communication is not to
block meaning but to make useful meaning.)
What if the cable conglomerate aired a documentary on foxes (more
likely on the Discovery Channel)? Certainly here would be a wealth of
signs for the community of students to go and test. We the students
296 Laura U. Marks
could put its signs into action and thereby learn for ourselves whether
foxes should be shot, like lettuce, and so forth. But most first-worlders
see more TV than foxes. So the Fox Channel (and actually, more ominously, the Discovery Channel and other forms of virtual tourism that
can act as replacements for interaction with the less-mediated world) is
free to make claims about foxes, or other things in the world, that are
untestable for most people. We have no way to determine whether its
information is true, that is, produces belief that leads to habits of action.
(Similar arguments could be made for Pikachu, the Bach jingle, and the
other corporate objects I have been toying with.) Locked in a circuit of
untestable claims, we are assailed by the undemocratic nature of media
knowledge.
The sociality and communicability fundamental to Peirces philosophy are at the same time its weak points, for it is here that corporate
interests have managed to hijack meaning. Peirce did acknowledge that
power corrupts the making of meaning. He condemned social organizations, such as religious hierarchies, that replace scientific inquiry
with forced agreement to the dominant ideas of the time.30 Similarly,
his disdain for the muddy thinking of contemporary philosophers
seems bound up with a critique of their kowtowing to a system of academic privilege.31 He also criticized, with a teacherly disapproval one
can hear in his words, the sheer laziness that prevented humans from
coming up with clear, substantial, useful ideas. But nagging alone will
not produce good students. Peirces anxiety reflects the pressure of
powerful institutions on the modest, collective efforts of the community of students.
In terms of meaning production, then, corporate signs introduce a
deadening, a closed circuit in the semiotic flow. Yes, we can have our
own experience in the information age. Information media allow us to
live a rich mesh of experience, both actual and virtual, at both personal
and impersonal levels. But not social. Information media in capitalism
are not interested in identifying collectives; they are interested in targeting markets. They produce a closed circuit that would rather not be
tested in collective experience. We may have rich individual experience
of mass phenomena, but the social dimension atrophies. If meaning is a
collective, time-based process, our experience is not very meaningful.
The Semiotic Agent
Bergson and Peirce, at the dawn of the information media age, recognized that institutions of power occupy peoples mental space for
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297
perceiving, thinking, and creating. They worried that corporate symbolization replaces agreement with rhetoric. Each imagined a subject of
knowledge Bergsons centre of indetermination, Peirces community
of students who could continue the project of meaningful experience.
But, retrospective as such formulations usually are, the kind of person
Bergson and Peirce were describing had already ceased to exist. At best,
it persisted only in the leisured classes. The emerging subject of attention described by nineteeth-century psychology was indeed a centre of
indetermination but, like a magnet, capitalist culture had come along
to overdetermine it from the outside.
We in postindustrial, first-world societies are especially subject to the
strangulation of the process of meaning. Individually we are just not
strong enough to rebuild it ourselves: we can have experience, but it is
hard to have meaningful experience. Yet collectively we cannot agree
on truths as quickly as truths are foisted upon us. It is hard to find a
way out of corporate medias short circuit; and frankly, often theres little incentive.
Is there any collective who is capable of taking back the semiotic
flow? This was the urgent question of Deleuze, who drew fruitfully
upon Bergson and Peirce to describe cinematic thought. However,
when the question became not, how do we perceive? but, how can we
survive? he turned away from these two and toward the radical
thought of Nietzsche and Artaud. He understood that both twentyfirst-century media and the people to whom it addressed itself were
objects without a centre. The automatic movement of the cinema produces in us a spiritual automaton that can either be subjugated by the
new images or mutually transformed with them.32 Between us, the people and the media, there is the possibility of annihilation or of profound
creativity but no simple muddling along. The new acephalic, plural
subject, the collective automaton, has succeeded the individual. The
era of luxurious, individual contemplation is over, at least in the postindustrial, hypermediated world. But the collective automaton might be
capable of new forms of creativity and new forms of life. It must be, if
we are to survive as more than slaves.
Deleuze was more interested in the way powerlessness forces us to
believe in life, at least to believe in the body the First that makes possible a new Third than in searching for an agent of change. Where
there might have been an agent, Deleuze discovered a double absence,
the people who are missing and the I who is absent, between which
memory is a membrane.33 Yet in this double absence there is also an
agent precisely because it cannot work alone yet does not form part of
298 Laura U. Marks
an identifiable collective. It is the very people who are missing, citizens of nowhere, for whom independent perception and thought is not
a luxury but a necessity.
In another writing I have described in detail how the cinema of colonized people derives fabulous new forms of life from the very untenability of their present situation.34 Now I ask: Who is in a position to
bypass the corporate hijacking of the semiotic process? The answer is:
people it is not made for. Unemployed people with time to observe the
world for themselves. People in third world countries where corporate
semiosis is slower, whether through their lack of access to corporate
information or through the bricolage of information from different
sources that demands a testing and winnowing process.
A particularly acute semiotic agency is called for from immigrants,
colonized people who arrive in the land of the colonizer. Immigrants
arrive in unfamiliar circumstances, often literally unable to read the
signs. Much of the knowledge they possessed becomes suddenly useless. At the same time, they are to some degree immune to the corporate
semiotic process that seizes others. Unable to buy and benefit from the
closed-circuit services corporations provide (with the exception, say,
of telephone cards and wire transfer companies like Western Union,
which in any given city advertise in the languages most widely spoken
by immigrants there), they are relatively free from the enchaining
of meaning so compelling for people who are corporations target
markets. Interestingly, Peirce recognized the agency of intercultural
exchange in knowledge. Departing from a critique of religious regimes
from Europe to Siam, he notes that even in the most oppressive society
people exist who possess a wider sort of social feeling and are able to
compare their beliefs with those of other cultures.35
Immigrants cannot rely on prefabricated truths. Their hypotheses
are testable in life-or-death (or expulsion) circumstances. Their perceptual awareness and ability to make fine distinctions, the First and Second of the semiotic process, engage acutely in smelling an edible meal
or smelling a bad deal, differentiating taxis and cop cars, samaritans
and con artists. The process is nothing if not social, for every gleaning
of information spreads by word of mouth. If the truth of information
must be evaluated according to the habits of action it produces, and
these habits are such grave things as legal residence, gainful employment, freedom from persecution, and outwitting those who prey on the
powerless and all this is urgently tested against the experiences of
others then immigrants are the most accomplished community of
Immigrant Semiosis
299
students of our time. They are taking back the semiotic flow, making
meaning that matters.
Similar arguments could be made on behalf of other socially marginal groups, such as poor people, or people with disabilities, in a given
culture. I hesitate to name women, or children, as the agents of this process. Though both need to engage sensory, embodied awareness in
order to read between the signs of unfamiliar or oppressive situations,
both are well-established targets of corporate semiotics. I note that
mobile phonewielding youths are not only growing bigger thumbs;
they are also developing new forms of sociality and new languages
adapted to the economical format of text messaging. But Nokia encourages them to do just that. So I maintain that immigrants, marginal to the
power structures of both corporation and state and possessing subterranean communication networks, seem best to embody Peirces criteria
of autonomy and democracy.
What are the media of these democratic fora, of true Thirdness? Twoway media: cellular telephones, e-mail, electronic word of mouth.
Immigrants also bend unilateral communications media so they become almost interactive: low-watt radio establishes a local community,
for example, for migrant workers, and can be quickly dismantled;
pirated cable television from back home functions as a quasi-interactive
medium, as immigrants avidly cultivate knowledge about the country
they left. But the new two-way, computer-based communications, decentred, accessible from (almost) anywhere, and untraceable off the
grid, provide ideal communications for illegal immigrants. The beauty
of a numeric, placeless address is that the users are accessible as long as
they are in a satellite footprint or near an Internet caf if they want to
be. And by the same token, they can disappear from the reaches of all
those who seek contact creditors, employers, even family merely by
cancelling the account.
But indeed any medium, including Fox TV, is transformed by immigrant semiosis. That slowing-down that first-worlders must work at,
in order to taste the freshness of Firstness, is a basic principle for
immigrants. Anybody can cultivate their own immigrant semiosis in
order to see the world anew. From the velvety olive to the sleek Fox,
the estrangement of fresh perception can urge us backward to the
social, to seek a community of interlocutors with whom we can debate
their meaning. But, only if we agree that there is more meaning than
information media hand down to us. The questions what actions
will result from these new perceptions? what meaning might arise
300 Laura U. Marks
from these actions? introduces social life back into the very First of
experience.
A last note of modesty and caution. Meaning is destined for the
future. In his later writings Peirce increasingly emphasized that
thought is more powerful and more vital than the material world,
including individual, passing human beings. The surprising sentence
Matter is effete mind, inveterate habits becoming physical laws36 is
another way of saying that the value of thought is in its connection to
other thoughts, whether in communication between people or in the
succession of an individuals thought. So it is not the community but
the thought that outlasts the community, that is ultimately valuable.
Put otherwise, future community is the guarantee of present meaning.
Individual man, Peirce writes, is only a negation to the process of
meaning-making, insofar as he or she is separate from the community
and the future.37
This cold faith in future knowledge might seem at odds with the
warm hope I place in immigrant knowledge. Peirces grail was objectivity, even at the expense of the communities that produced it. Immigrant
semiosis, like that of others with little power, produces solid quasiobjective truth because it is interested, not disinterested. The habits of
action immigrants come up with, based on their rigorous testing, may
not be true for all time, pace Peirce. But immigrant semiosis breaks the
circuit of faux corporate meaning with a vigour that a disinterested
community of scientists lacks. For such future when the community of
students might come (back?) into being, immigrant semiosis guards a
triadic toolbox: remember your body; remember how to think; keep
learning how to communicate.
NOTES
I am deeply indebted to Ali Ferdi Ahmani, a master of immigrant semiosis, for
showing me how humans can build meaning with senses alert and communications, even from jingling mobile phones, richly democratic. I am also grateful
to Martin Lefebvre, a much more exacting Peircean than am I, for his generously thoughtful comments. The germ of this writing was my catalogue essay
Slow Down! Affect in the Information Age, for the program Out of Time at
the Oberhausen Short Film Festival (2001).
1 Canadas Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (formerly Bill C-11),
Immigrant Semiosis
2
3
4
5
7
8
10
11
12
301
passed December 2001, emphasizes marketable skills while closing the

back door to criminals. Citizenship and Immigration Canada, http://
www.cic.gc.ca/english/irpa/c11-overview.html (no longer online). In 2000
Germany welcomed the ten thousand desperately needed foreign information-technology workers, but only for a five-year stint before it booted
them back to their homes in Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia.
See Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern
Culture (Boston: MIT Press, 2000).
Vincent M. Colapietro, Peirces Approach to the Self: A Semiotic Perspective on
Human Subjectivity (Albany: SUNY Press, 1989), 70.
Floyd Merrell, Peirces Semiotics Now: A Primer (Toronto: Canadian Scholars
Press, 1995).
Tor Nrretranders, The User Illusion: Cutting Consciousness Down to Size,
trans. Jonathan Sydenham (New York: Penguin, 1998), 143. Nrretranders, a
popular science writer, gives these examples: eyes receive ten million bits
per second, while the conscious bandwidth of vision is forty bits per second;
the skin receives one million bits of information per second, while the conscious bandwidth of touch is one bit per second. The method of quantification sounds a bit fishy to me, but the results are compelling nonetheless.
The categories preconscious and conscious do not overlap precisely with
First and Second. Like other pragmatic philosophers, Peirce privileged the
element of choice in perception, a view negated by recent findings in cognitive science. Thus much of the decision making that Peirce designated as
Second still takes place below the threshold of consciousness.
C.S. Peirce, Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 238.
For a manifesto for the free movement of electrons, see my essay How Electrons Remember, in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002), 16175.
Within cognitive science, work on embodied cognition offers a much more
nuanced model of human consciousness. See for example Francisco J.
Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive
Science and Human Experience (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991); Rafael
Nunez and Walter J. Freeman, eds, Reclaiming Cognition: The Primacy of
Action, Intention, and Emotion (Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic, 2000); Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando:
Harcourt, 2003).
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 29.
Ibid., 323.
When Deleuze first criticized the unfreedom of movement-image cinema,
302 Laura U. Marks
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
he described the pull into action that is the underlying principle of continuity editing. Now something different is going on in popular media. In commercial movies, advertising, computer games, and music television,
continuity is a thing of the past. Jump cuts, reflexivity, shock, and spectacle
call attention to the film as a constructed object. But there is nothing subversive about these films anti-illusionism.
Cameron said this in a discussion with students following his receipt of
an honorary doctorate at Carleton University in May 1997. He argued that
his films, such as The Terminator and Titanic, arouse more complex responses than the mere production of adrenaline.
Is the collective awe people feel on viewing a glorious sunset different from
the collective awe produced by a Steven Spielberg movie or a Cline Dion
recording? I think so. Neither is natural there is some social consensus
that a sunset is glorious but the sunset is not trying to compel us to its
ends, as the powers behind Spielberg and Dion are.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and
Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 189.
With the exception that these prior analyses are not mine alone, as memory
is for Bergson, but social.
Such films are the subject of Martine Beugnets book Cinema and Sensation:
Contemporary French Film and the Art of Transgression (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
See Laura U. Marks, Invisible Media, in New Media: Theories and Practices
of Digitextuality, ed. Anna Everett and John T. Caldwell (New York: Routledge, 2003); and Enfolding and Unfolding: An Aesthetics for the Information Age, Vectors: Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular
4 (spring 2007), http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/04_issue/
unfoldingenfolding.
This process is illustrated in the example a childs drawing in Marks,
Enfolding and Unfolding.
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 326.
Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott
Palmer (New York: Zone, 1988), 105.
Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire, in Illuminations, trans.
Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), 185.
Crary, Suspensions of Perception, 327n107.
Peirce, Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs, in Philosophical Writings of
Peirce, ed. Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 115.
I believe this is especially true of music, which, like smell, has a strong affective relationship to precise, individual, spatiotemporal memories.
Immigrant Semiosis
303
26 Peirce, Logic as Semiotic, 99.

27 It is difficult to share Peirces faith in science, given how science is embedded in, its very questions and methodologies determined by, institutions of
power. See Sandra Harding, Is Science Multicultural? Postcolonialisms, Feminisms, and Epistemologies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), for
a summary of various sciences colonial, capitalist, racial, androcentric, and
other investments of power. Yet the fluid exchange between materialism
and idealism in his semiotic process gives me hope that at least some truths
in our world are Peircean truths.
28 Peirce, How to Make Our Ideas Clear, Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed.
Justus Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 30.
29 Ethnographic filmmakers Sol Worth and John Adair wanted to train
Navajo people to film so that they could capture their own perceptions of
the world and, it was hoped, their own perceptual processes. When the
elder had confirmed that filming would neither harm nor help the sheep,
he asked, Then why make movies? Sol Worth and John Adair, Through
Navajo Eyes: An Exploration in Film Communication and Anthropology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1972). But the Peircean mode
suggests that making movies does have an effect on the sheep.
30 Peirce, The Fixation of Belief, in Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed. Justus
Buchler (New York: Dover, 1955), 1314.
31 To this system Peirce, a philosopher whose massive oeuvre remained
largely unpublished and who was never offered a tenured post by the university, owed nothing.
32 Deleuze, Cinema 2, 157.
33 Ibid., 221.
34 In The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), especially chap. 1.
35 Peirce, The Fixation of Belief, 14.
36 C.S. Peirce, Tychism, in Collected Papers, vol. 6: Scientific Metaphysics, ed.
Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1935), chap. 24, 20.
37 Peirce, Some Consequences of Four Incapacities, 250.
16 Precepts for Digital Artwork

sean cubi tt
In his essay The Task of the Translator, Walter Benjamin offers a metaphor that seems as apposite to the transitions between analogue and
digital as it is to both the problem of translation and the ethics of interpretation:
Fragments of a vessel that are to be glued together must match one
another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another.
In the same way a translation, instead of imitating the sense of the original,
must lovingly and in detail incorporate the originals way of meaning,
thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a larger vessel.1
The dream of a universal language of symbols dates back to Ramon

Lull and, in a trajectory through Leibnizian calculus and Condorcet,
stretches into the mathematicization of science and to George Booles
construction of a universal logic calculus, the heart of digital computing. Yet Benjamins universal language is not, as the impossibility of
translation makes clear, an actual or a lost treasure: it is a virtual language, a tongue which does not or not yet, and, perhaps, can never
exist. Nonetheless, as virtual, it is an immanent and pervasive creative
force whose task is the (re)making of a communicative universe. Science is an activity of translating from the physical to the symbolic; but
beyond its actuality there lies the potential for a universe in which
human and natural might converse. Such conversation has as its third
term the media through which it is conducted, the technologies and
techniques that mediate, neither invisibly nor inaudibly, nor yet as
noise and interference, but as active participants in the dialogue. There-
Precepts for Digital Artwork
305
fore, when we come to speak of the tasks of translation between people,

or between people and their environments, we must also turn to the
translators themselves, the transparent or opaque screens that not so
much transfer or block communication as vibrate in sympathy with it
and with their own internal dynamics. Whether consciousness is
uniquely human or not, whether it is contingent on the material world
or a function of technique, to abrogate a special status to human consciousness in the construction of a universal language is arrogant and,
much worse, unlikely to produce what it seeks as its fulfillment. The
translation between analogue and digital is then not just a matter of
digitizing. It is at one and the same time a translation from one mode of
being to another, with enormous implications for the phenomenon and
the meaning of the translated, and a translation of one mode of consciousness into another. Not surprisingly, the result is fragmentation, a
fragmentation in which the key interest is not the fragments themselves
songs, sounds, pictures, words but the gaps between them. These
gaps, these aporias, are not void, however: they are the virtual space in
which the potentiality of universal language bubbles through, a perpetually self-constructing latticework of connections, relations, attempted
taxonomies, montage.
Modernist montage, however, has failed to free itself from the ideologies of industrial dominance and the sovereign human consciousness.
Here is how Adorno expresses it:
Montage disposes over the elements that make up the reality of an
unchallenged common sense, either to transform their intention or, at
best, to awaken their latent language. It is powerless, however, in so far as
it is unable to explode the individual elements. It is precisely montage
that is to be criticized for possessing the remains of a complaisant irrationalism, for adaptation to material that is delivered ready-made from
outside the work ... the principle of montage therefore became that of construction. There is no denying that even in the principle of construction, in
the dissolution of materials and their subordination to an imposed unity,
once again something smooth, harmonistic, a quality of pure logicality is
conjured up that seeks to establish itself as ideology. It is the fatality of all
contemporary art that it is contaminated by the untruth of the ruling
totality.2
In Adornos complex dialectical account, montage abstracts elements

shots from their place in order to subordinate them to an artistic plan.
306 Sean Cubitt
In doing so it at once deprives them of their rational place in the world

and simultaneously supplants that with its own rationalism, an obverse
of the instrumental rationalism of which it is attempting to be the negation. Montages failure to analyse and expose the elements allows them
to bring with them their existing ideological associations, now freed of
the complexities of their existence outside the constructed artwork.
Worse still, in emulating, albeit as a counter-aesthetic, the drive to totality which characterizes dominance, montage resituates human consciousness at the summit of creation and condemns its unanalysed
objects, reordered and restructured but unquestioned, to silence and
obedience, the prerequisites of their enslavement to the commodity
form.
The primary task of contemporary media is then not to represent an
object world to a subject supposed to have a monopoly on consciousness. That task belonged to a historical epoch when the emergent and
then triumphant industrial bourgeoisie required an artistic and scientific culture to promote the philosophy of willed domination over an
alienated nature and an objectified and, to that extent, also alienated
industrial class structure. Industrial capital created a culture of materials, including technology and the labour force, that required the formgiving principles of an industrial aesthetic, focused on the intensely
local hub of manufacture: the factory. Industrial networks were a function of their nodes.
In the information economy, the nodes are functions of their networks. The global today is necessarily prior to the local, especially
those localities that, like the border-free trade zones of Tijuana studied
by Coco Fusco, are sites of oppression.3 The reality of a woman forced
into prostitution by the strategic requirements of the global economy
cannot be photographed. No indexical account, anchored in the preeminence of the local in industrial culture, would be sufficient to understand the forces acting on her.4 A photograph would only stir the sentimentality defined a hundred years ago by the novelist Meredith:
pleasure without responsibility. Responsibility today derives not from
empathy, and certainly not from metropolitan prurience, but from
understanding the networks that force her into this double economic
and sexual oppression. The task of an iconic art is no longer to depict
but to articulate the symbolic regimes that describe, define, and give
meaning both to her experience and to that of her oppressors, who
include every user of the computers she builds when not supplementing her non-union subsistence wages with sex labour in the tourist
307
economy. The digital artwork must be networked, and the formation of

alternative networks is a critical function of them.
An artwork is material, and an artwork that fails to take account of its
materiality fails to that extent. Digital materials are no exception. What
is vital in the indexical quality of media arts is not that they point away
from themselves towards a recorded past to which is ascribed a reality
they deny themselves. Rather, digital indexicality presents its own
materiality as what it is a concrete node constituted in the networks of
social relationships, including the NAFTA sweatshops. As Margaret
Morse argues of digital installation art, the contemporary artwork must
construct its own locale, not presume it.5 The embodiment that concerns it is not the depicted body abstracted into a type that can be identified as the body, but a specific body constructed as local in the locality
of the installation itself, a unique body which there confronts the imbrication of embodiment in the global networks that are brought to bear in
the devices that surround it. In this way the digital index points not
towards the recorded past of representation but to the materiality of the
present as a concrete node of a networked society. The digital artwork
must be material, and its materiality incorporates the bodies that come
into contact with it and the local space and present time of their coexistence.
After the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century, we need to
pause over the word material. No longer merely a matter of matter,
since Einstein we have known that matter and energy are modes of the
same physical reality, and that time and space are of one substance.
Since Shannon and Weaver, we have also known that information and
entropy are integral to the physical universe. We can no longer refer to
materiality as the mark of permanence; on the contrary. To describe the
digital artwork as material then has as its corollary a second quality: the
digital artwork is processual. When the index depicts its object, it both
objectifies that object and presents itself as another object standing over
against the depicted. But in the information economy, objectality is a
secondary effect of primary flows, an argument made as forcefully by
urbanists like Saskia Sassen6 and Manuel Castells7 as it is by Deleuze
and Guattari.8 In the process of imaging flow, the principle of indexicality itself demands abandoning the index as primary resource, since
there is no object toward which it can stand in any relation. Instead, the
intrinsically relational symbol takes priority. Information flows are relational first: content, expression, even form are secondary to this materiality. If the digital artwork is to be adequate to this relational world, it
308 Sean Cubitt
must itself prioritize relations. Communication is that relationship

which precedes its terms from the same standpoint, a line is no longer
the shortest distance between two points; instead the terminal points
are defined by the activity of the line. The active principle of communication defines senders and receivers, not vice versa. The material process of establishing relationships, which I tend to call mediation, is the
core task of digital art today. It should also be emphasized here that the
processes of mediation are not necessarily exclusively human. In the
digital art field, they also can and, perhaps, must engage the technological relation actualizing the physicality of mediation, the technologies employed in it, as partners in the dialogue. We can no longer deploy
machines as fixed capital without submitting ourselves to the anonymous and, to that extent, autonomous dead labour of the machine in
pursuit of that anonymity and autonomy that post-subjectivity seeks in
mirroring the dissolution of the object in information flows. The digital
artwork must mediate and, in submitting to the mediation of technology, offer itself to the task of vindicating the generations whose lost lives
are congealed into the shape of our devices. Digital art is not just continuous with the past; it is a dialogue with the dead.
The acceleration of modernity in contemporary societies has reached
a point at which the pseudo-instantaneous management of data flows
has resulted in what at first glance appears as a total administration of
the present. When cultural critics as alert as Paul Virilio describe communication as instantaneous,9 not only do they deny the materiality of
mediation, they fall into an ideological trap laid precisely by the administration. Discourse that surrenders to the ideology of light-speed communication presents as normative the proposition that the present is
always already documented represented, distributed, consumed, and
past. The technological fact is that transmission is delayed not only by
the institutional processing which administration demands, but by the
physical limits to the speed of electromagnetic wave forms. Very, very
fast is still not instantaneous, and the present should never be mistaken
for its occupation by images of even the most recent past the one
twenty-fifth of a second required, for example, to build up an electron
scan on a video monitor. As process, not object, the digital artwork
must inhabit the present as a moment of becoming, a moment whose
reception is therefore always deferred into a future which has not yet
become.
The immediate result of this habitation of the present is that the digital artwork is by nature ephemeral. The remarkable archiving of Web
309
and Net art undertaken by Steve Dietz at the Walker Art Gallery is a
case in point. Dietz was clear as curator, and the design of the frame
that surrounded the documented sites ensured that any visitor should
be too, that what was archived there is not art but documentation. (The
Walkers Net art archive was discontinued in 2001; some of the content
can be accessed via the Way Back Machine, but the significant framing
is no longer available further evidence of the ephemerality of media
arts in general and Net art in particular.) The important task of
archiving does not deny ephemerality: on the contrary, it affirms the
gap between archive and art and asserts if anything the necessity of
the distinction. Like the special effects blockbuster, the digital artwork
is condemned to be cutting-edge; but, unlike the blockbuster, it does
not suffer from the patina of the out-of-date that so rapidly scratches
the emulsion of films that have passed their sell-by. Instead, that passage into the archive ensures both that the code enabling the work
becomes a resource for other artists (an author who teaches writers nothing teaches no one)10 at the same time that it ceases to function as an
occupant of the present. If the Web, as auto-surveillant traffic in documents, is a self-mapping device, its cartography is itself effervescent
a simulation that is no sooner recorded than it becomes defunct. In the
same way, the instruction set that generates a digital artwork is over as
soon as it has completed its run. This is why the effects movie is never
an artwork, and why Photoshop images are so aesthetically moribund:
what has been aesthetic in them is the process of making once that
process is terminated, the art is over, and what is presented to the public is only its discarded archival image. To this extent, whatever is
mimetic in the digital is a mimesis of a task already accomplished, a
body that is already past, and as such is excluded from the aesthetics
of digital artworks, in which the process is as yet unfinished. The
mimetic persists, but as a raw material for further processes. In this
sense, the digital artwork is obliged to be incomplete, its ephemerality
dependent on the deferral of all goals to a time which cannot be
achieved in the artwork but toward which it aspires, and in whose
direction it gestures.
Moreover, the ephemerality of the digital is an integral element of its
formal properties. As Virilio would say, the invention of the computer
is also of necessity the invention of the computer crash. Many of the
most significant works Jodis are the most obvious are dependent on
the disruption of the normative efficiency which has been inscribed
into computer design as an ideology if not a reality. In the Net artwork
310 Sean Cubitt
Lapses and Erasures, Sawad Brooks undertakes a related task, writing

in a text note to the piece:
In analog media, when something is erased, it is often possible to sense the
mark left by erasure. Thus Rauschenberg was able to present his Erased
de Kooning drawing as his own (ironically). Erasure leaves its own traces,
it is writing or drawing. It is a wiping clean which puts forth an order with
the possibility of decipherment ... I make drawing interfaces to draw upon
the erasure of erasure in the realm of the digital.11
If drawing is a practice in which artists subordinate themselves to the

activity of the line as to a machine designed to generate a non-volitional
autonomy from selfhood, as it is in the work of David Connearn, subordination to the technologies of computer memory offers a further
tool: the double negation of the erasure that the computer also enables,
its amnemotechnics, becomes a resource for the construction of the
future as the erased erasure of the past. The proof is that it is almost
impossible to erase a file accidentally. Traces remain from which skilled
operators can retrieve even the most shredded data as, once again, the
Microsoft trial researchers proved in their fossicking among the deadletter offices of internal e-mails. Erasure is a making of traces in the
form of what has been erased, but where in analogue media what is
revealed is the surface which the erased drawing itself erased, in the
digital there is no pre-existing surface, only the space created by the act
of recording, so that what erasure produces is the evidence of a surface
that never existed prior to the erasure. At the same time, however, the
erasure is never complete, but approaches asymptotically to the mystical point of zero existence. Here, as in the attempt to make a total artwork, zero resembles infinity more than it does unity and can only be
approached by infinitesimal subdivisions of the existing. Where analogue media had the power to work in the binary opposition of presence and absence, the digital are endowed or cursed with an inability to
deal in absolutes. To this extent then, the digital artwork must be
imperfect, since it can never achieve either absolute existence or absolute absence. The greatest benefit of this discovery is that the imperative towards harmony need not be heeded, and the digital is thus freed
of the necessity of harmonizing formally a world that is, in all its relations, so profoundly inharmonious. The digital is profoundly incapable
of that perfected harmony in which the ideological tasks of societies are
achieved under the guise of the autonomous artwork.
311
The processual nature of digital art makes it incomplete and imperfect, in the sense that it cannot achieve the absolute completion and
perfection of pure presence. In fact that metaphysics of presence, abandoned first by mathematics in the mid-nineteenth century, now haunts,
as absence, only the transitory sublime of annihilation as special effect.
Nonetheless, though practice has all but abandoned it, the sublime still
haunts contemporary aesthetics from Adorno to Danto as both the Kantian marvelling at domination and its negation, the abjection of the subject. This unappetizing metaphysical binary suits the times, as visible in
the new cult of Bataille as it is in the neo-Kantianism of Lyotards late
writings. The result is a performance, typical of idealist metaphysics,
which simulates the aesthetic dialectic in the static play of a rational/
irrational binary that merely enacts modernitys logic of efficiency and
degradation. In aesthetic terms, here rigor mortis masquerades as danse
macabre. It fails not so much because of this stasis, however, nor because
of its misreading of the present as what is the case, but because it takes
reason and unreason as essential terms in an epoch in which essences
no longer pertain. What distinguishes the digital artwork is its elegance, in the sense intended by David Gelernter: its clarity, economy of
means, operational grace.12
This is not to say that digital artworks are passionless and formalist.
On the contrary: the hall of binary mirrors that traps essentialist art produces that affectless manipulation of tear ducts, erections, and fight-orflight adrenal secretions in sedentary and stultified consumers. It is
rather the case that the characteristic emotions of digital artworks the
movement through disorientation to new orientation, for example, in a
dislocated place, the gasp at beauty realized on the wing, the complex
humour of, for example, the First International Competition of Form
Art are more subtly and actively conformed to the changed character
of accelerated modernity. They are, in a word, necessary. The digital artwork must be necessary: its elegance is a function of the need for the
work. That need can no longer be formed as expression, although it
remains true that contemporary capital is ever more dependent on the
hyperindividuated narcissism of the competitive corporate playpen,
and an art that pretends to bypass that lens of subjectivity thereby fails
to respond to the necessity of individuation as a passage through which
a work moves. Expression remains, but now as the anonymous product
of autonomous networks.
Aesthetic necessity arises at once from the fact of flow, its mediations
and the temporalities they engender. The tendency of capital is toward
312 Sean Cubitt
monopoly; that of its flows toward domination. Control over financial

flows in particular is the goal of transnational capital. But this goal is
realizable only in the eradication of difference, that difference which
produces flow from one place to another. That difference, since it cannot be eradicated systemically without destroying the flows themselves, is now displaced into the managed future of corporate planning,
most directly in the simulation of future markets. But, when the future
is evoked as the basis of global stability, capital faces a crisis of unpredictability. As ideology, future modelling depends on ever more refined
data sets and ever more rigorous algorithms for their projection. But it
is precisely in computer modelling that the problem of turbulence is
posed most categorically: not only definitionally, but technically, the
future resists modelling.
By dint of its pseudo-theological position in the regime of global data
flows and their perpetually deferred promise of perpetually deferred
payment, the future is held to vindicate the claims of the present to
wholeness and completion. But the deferral on which that wholeness
rests denies that wholeness to it. As the active relationality of networks,
mediation, by definition in process and incomplete, is thus forced to
pretend to a completion that it cannot attain. Its materiality is deferred
into the not-yet as the price of its present functioning (a state of affairs
that generates the illusion of static binary oppositions). This contradiction in turn generates the digital aesthetic as its necessary outcome: the
materiality is restored to the present, while the function is shifted into
the unforeseeable future. Hegels concept of art as the consciousness of
need is the inspiration for this insight; but, as the digital aesthetic arises
from the relationality of global networks inclusive of human and
machine components, that consciousness is now not individual or even
merely social, but cyborg. The digital artwork is cyborg: it responds to
the institutional, economic, and discursive formation of corporations as
actually existing cyborgs by building an alternative consciousness in
which the mechanical is no longer the object of domination but integral
partner in the production of culture. Neither the consciousness under
construction nor the need to which art responds is then entirely or
purely human.
In order for the future to be held up as the settling of accounts on the
promissory notes of the economic, political, and ecological present, it is
essential for the administration of global data flows that the future be
isolated from the present so that the promised completion on the deals
which are the dominant mode of communication today need never
arise. Here a specifically temporal contradiction arises: the difference
313
between future and present is both affirmed and eradicated. The future
must be both continuous with the present (all debts depend on the concept that they can eventually be paid) and entirely divorced from it
(since debt is the motor of financial flows, they must never be allowed
to be paid). It is this fault line of difference between present and future
that requires the digital as its necessary outcome: its elegance derives in
part from its determination as the inhabitance of the present as difference. The digital artwork has no choice but to affirm the immanence of
the future at the point of its emergence.
The necessity of the digital artwork is then not organic in the sense
propounded by Romantic aesthetic philosophy, since it necessarily
abjures wholeness. Instead, the digital works at the level of mediation
as the unhappy conscience of dominant communication, a cyborg will
to grace. The digital is then communicative rather than representational. This places it in opposition to the evolution of e-cash as the
supposedly immaterial universal signifier of all exchange values, promoting the substitutability of everything for anything. Asserting aesthetic difference restores neither the individuality of objects nor the
objectality of individuals, the reciprocal functioning of index and identity resulting from industrial modes of communication. Instead, it
asserts the primacy of mediation, of the material of relations. In this perspective, the digital artwork can be assessed according to the breadth,
depth, and complexity of the networks it engages or engenders. Unlike
Deleuzean difference, however, aesthetic difference is not an absolute
horizon external to all humanity and all communication; but it is a difference intrinsic to communication which, viewed outside the confining
determinations of the actually existing historical conditions, is defined
by its tendency towards inclusiveness and its capacity for translation,
misunderstanding, and so for interpretation and systemic innovation.
Communications own need, bred in the interface of combined human
and technological networks, is that of a newly cyborg communicative
species for inclusion and autonomy. The digital is the necessary next
phase in this historical process, a process which I believe is synonymous
with history: hastening the globalization of the mediating infrastructure while driving forward those internal contradictions that make the
global and deferred information economy unthinkably neither present
nor future. Like Ed Dorns railway wagon, everything is behind and
nothing in front. Mediation is the activity through which the hybrid
communicative species become, and specifically how they become
other than they now are.
When, as D.N. Rodowick explains, Deleuze argues that what philos-
314 Sean Cubitt
ophy resists ... [is] the globalization and banalization of information as

a power that affirms the dominance of late capitalism,13 we perceive
both the binarism that hog-ties Deleuzes philosophy for lack of a dialectic, and the weakness of a politics that relies on the unequal struggle
of philosophy against world capitalism. You can be guaranteed that
philosophy will only ever resist, and that it will never triumph. Against
this brave, pious, but ineffectual quietism, and against what Eco refers
to as the negative theology of philosophical nihilism from Heidegger
to Baudrillard,14 the digital artwork must be communicative, for only
communication is vast enough and necessary enough to endure and
overcome the vicissitudes through which it is being tortured in the age
in which communication is information, information is power, and
money and data are electronically indistinguishable.
The implication of the theses of ephemerality and communication is
that the digital has an altered relation with consumption. Much electronic art owed and owes its genesis to the conceptual art of the 1970s
and to the critique of the commodity that gave rise to media as varied
as LeWitts instruction sets, the Situationiste Internationales derive, and
the community workshop and newsreel movements. But now that the
commodity itself is in a state of implosion, a vacuity both raged against
and celebrated in mainstream culture from Tarantino to hip-hop, the
focus of the digital is shifting from providing objects whose contemplation exposes the emptiness of the commodity towards building encounters for participation. This has little to do with what is usually referred
to by the term interaction. It concerns rather factors such as the level of
skill required of both producers and participants in digital artworks.
The digital artwork demands that audiences acquire a determinate set
of skills and understandings to participate fully in the work. In Toshio
Iwais Resonance of Four, for example, there is a default state that is
pretty but dull, while random gestures with the track ball will produce
interactive rewards, coloured lights and sounds. But the experience of
the work as artwork demands both understanding the principle of the
device as a composing machine and working in consort with three
other users to create music. Artisanship is integral to the digital: so the
best artists are also either engineers or groups including technologists
and programmers, and so our students demand of us programming
skills more than bundled packages. This goes against the current of the
televisualization of the Web, where the end-user-defined HTML language is being submerged in a wave of server-defined Javascript. Bolter
and Gromala argue that such enriched design moves beyond the com-
315
puter-specific forms of the early Web, moving instead towards a contextual design, alert to the bodies that use it.15 At the same time, the
success of Wiki and the blogosphere suggest a hunger for what Tim
Berners-Lee described as the full interactive power of alternatives to the
commercialized Web like the Linux-based Amaya browser.16 The old
balance cannot be restored: instead, it must be remade, as it is in interventions like The Webstalker that not only offer control but demand
active participation. Something similar is true of RTMarks Web works,
which imitate the control structures of corporate Web design but
demand action if they are to be experienced not as parody but as art.
Digital media are grounded in work in a second sense: to return to an
earlier theme, electronic media are grounded not in leisure, as the televisualization of the Web insists, but in the workplace. In place of the
elite contemplation of the refined consumer, the digital artwork
demands the intellectual and emotional graft needed to change the
work into something else, very clearly in the collective montage
projects now such an integral part of Web art, but also in projects like
Sera Furneauxs Kissing Booth, where users not only orchestrate virtual kisses but record their own into the booths database. In this
instance, the work does not exist until the user provides the input. This
culture of the database is akin to activist post-artworks like the SOS
Racisme mail-bombing of Le Pens National Front, or the Zapatista
Internetas of the Frankfurt stock exchange. Conceptualism left a legacy
of anti-commodity art: its dialectical outcome is a pro-work work. The
digital artwork is work, a labour shared in the humancomputer interface and, like any work, founded in a social process that demands cooperation among workers and between workers and those anonymous
forebears whose skills are enshrined and concretized in the dead labour
of our machines.
As work, the digital requires the shared labour, specifically, of artist
and audience, to the extent that the distinction begins to blur. To what
extent are Audio-ROM the authors of a sound piece I might make with
their programs and interfaces but using my own samples and, since the
coding is open, my own coding too? This scares, on the one hand, those
brought up in the expressive ideology of the art schools and, on the
other, those humanist scholars who, thirty years ago, leapt at the novel
focus of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to
abandon attempts to understand labour. Yet work is today a curiously
liberating principle. To the extent that artists relinquish control over the
artwork and, to that extent, over the audience, the audience must
316 Sean Cubitt
assume the same degree of responsibility for the work that the artist has
abandoned in offering it to them. Without that assumption of responsibility, the artwork resorts to the default state of older art: passivity and
what we must now understand as the anaesthetic. The digital artwork
demands responsibility: there is no art where the audience does not take
up this gauntlet and where instead it reserves for itself the sentimental
position, enjoyment without responsibility. This is the burden of Eduardo Kacs Teleporting an Unknown State, in which the survival of a
small plant depended on CUSeeMe clients providing it with remote
sunlight, or Ken Goldbergs Telegarden, which depended on telerobotic
users to tend the garden.17 Likewise, since even in death the labour of
past centuries is still exploited, the digital artworks destiny is to redeem
and liberate the concretized labour embodied in our communicative
machines. That is how the past becomes future, beyond the old lie of
posterity. After all, we are the future that our ancestors looked to to
judge and justify them, and we are not worthy unless we seize the
present as the becoming of their future. This is the responsibility that we
take up, the only people among all the humans who have ever lived
who are alive now.
Under the existing circumstances difference is not a given, a foundation (however complex), or a horizon but a job of work: making a
difference. Communication, under the historical conditions of contemporary capital, can no longer be presumed as an a-historical given. In a
time in which it is almost entirely identifiable with the circulations of
global finance, such that our consumption of commodities even is
merely a necessary moment in the circuits of capital, communication
must be fabricated, since it is no longer natural. On this fabrication
depends the making of a culture that is no longer crowned by the negation of its own negativity, as remains the case with accelerated modernity. Instead, the digital must turn towards the positive construction of
the present as difference, a creation that only becomes possible in the era
of a planetary communications infrastructure. As construction, the digital must forswear the sublime, for the sublime confronts us not as the
incomprehensible but as the incommunicable, an absolute horizon
beyond history. To construct is to act historically, to embrace the interests, human and technological, that have been left so egregiously unsatisfied by the culture of the commodity itself increasingly embraced in
the anaesthetic of its own sublime absence from itself. Change is the
quality of history and of beauty what is transient, what comes into
being in the moment as the emergence of futurity. The digital artwork
must be beautiful.
317
These explorations can be summarized in terms of a series of principles I have tried to voice here:
The digital artwork must be networked.
The digital artwork must be material.
The digital artwork is processual.
The digital artwork must mediate.
The digital artwork must inhabit the present as a moment of becoming.
The digital artwork is obliged to be incomplete.
The digital artwork is by nature ephemeral.
The digital artwork must be imperfect.
What distinguishes the digital artwork is its elegance.
The digital artwork must be necessary.
The digital artwork is cyborg.
The digital artwork must be communicative.
Artisanship is integral to the digital.
The digital artwork is work.
The digital artwork demands responsibility.
The digital artwork must be beautiful.
The digital is a malleable aesthetics, based on the principle that anything that can be made can be remade.18 Where the artworks of the
industrial era hover between existence and non-existence, presence and
absence, the digital seizes on the not-yet for its own domain at the
moment of its emergence. Its time is the time of becoming. The cost is
great: the loss of permanence, of authority, of wholeness. As work, the
artwork that ceases to transform the emergence of the future ceases to
be art and becomes archive.
To emphasize work is not merely to insist on the physical actuality of
instruction sets and displays. It indicates something of the conditions
under which the digital is undertaken as a task. Timothy Druckrey notes
that programming determines a set of conditions in which the represented is formed as an instruction, while language destabilizes the conditions through the introduction of formations in which the represented
is destabilized.19 The imbalance of instruction and extra-textual formations results in a new crisis in the theory of representation, itself already
reeling under the twin blows of consumer capitalism and postmodern
pessimism. The act of interpretation does not become impossible, faced
with the interminable question of the truth of the representation, but
more necessary. At the same time, the automation of tasks as programs
creates a two-tier society: those who enter data and those who interpret
318 Sean Cubitt
it. For those who create new means for both tasks is reserved what
increasingly appears to be the core of twenty-first-century wealth: intellectual property.20 To the extent that IP treaties are increasingly aimed at
removing the Berne Conventions droits dauteur,21 they are postmodern.
To the extent that they are reinscribing them as tradable commodities
owned by corporations, they are entirely capitalist.22 For all that Marx
has fallen off the core curriculum of media and art theory, class, commodity, and expropriation remain the largest challenges to any future,
and to that extent ethical imperatives driving digital art. Only when that
art is genuinely work can it communicate at the level of work, which
once again is becoming the centre of political life.
The innocence of play is denied us in a time when play has become a
key strategy of the corporate management of creativity in hock to the
production of new consumer goods. We may no longer inhabit the
present for its own sake, as the impressionists and the Lumire brothers
could, but only for the sake of a future for which we are enjoined to take
responsibility. The great negation that guided the avant-gardes of the
twentieth century no longer holds in the twenty-first; and, without that
guide, we risk the sentimental positivity of Ewoks and Tamagotchis.
Most of all, we suffer the immense burden of beauty, the terrible onus of
bringing into existence. But, on the positive side, we have the whole of
history, its staggering defeats and millennia of immiseration, to propel
us into the new.
NOTES
1 Walter Benjamin, The Task of the Translator, in Selected Writings, vol. 1,
19131926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA:
Bellknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1996), 25363.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London: Athlone Press, 1997),
567.
3 Coco Fusco, The Bodies That Were Not Ours and Other Writings (London:
Iniva/Routledge, 2001).
4 Hayden White, The Modernist Event, in The Persistence of Memory: Cinema,
Television and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (London: Routledge,
1996).
5 Margaret Morse, Virtualities: Television, Media Art, and Cyberculture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998).
319
6 Saskia Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1991).
7 Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, vol. 1, The
Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
8 Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, LAnti-Oedipe, vol. 1, and Mille Plateaux,
vol. 2, Capitalisme et Schizophrnie (Paris: ditions de Minuit, 1972, 1980).
9 Paul Virilio, Open Sky, trans. Julie Rose (London: Verso, 1997).
10 Benjamin, Walter, The Author as Producer, in Selected Writings, vol. 2, part
2, 19311934, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith
(Cambridge, MA: Bellknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 76882.
11 Sawad Brooks, http://www.thing.net/~sawad/erase/trait/text.html, 2000.
12 David Gelernter, The Aesthetics of Computing (London: Phoenix, 1998).
13 D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuzes Time Machine (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 192.
14 Umberto Eco, Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality, trans. William Weaver
(London: Minerva, 1986), 93.
15 Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, Windows and Mirrors: Interaction
Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2003).
16 Tim Berners-Lee, with Mark Fischetti, Weaving the Web (London: Orion,
1999).
17 Ken Goldberg, ed., The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in
the Age of the Internet (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).
18 Andy Deck, Curatorial Algorithms and Malleable Aesthetics, Millennium
Film Journal 34 (1999): 8291.
19 Timothy Druckrey, Netopos ... Notopos: The Fate of Reason in the Global
Network: Teleology, Telegraphy, Telephony, Television, Telesthetics, in Ars
Electronica: Facing the Future, ed. Timothy Druckrey and Ars Electronica
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 311.
20 Terry Flew, New Media: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2002), 154-9.
21 Armand Mattelart, The Information Society, trans. Susan G. Taponier and
James A. Cohen (London: Sage, 2003), 1256.
22 Christopher May, The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Cambridge, UK:
Polity Press, 2002).
Afterword:
What We Must Do
gene youngblo od
On 15 February 2003 more than ten million people poured into streets,
plazas, and boulevards around the world to demonstrate against neoliberal globalization and U.S. imperialism. Unprecedented in human
history, it was a manifestation of enormous unconquerable power, an
image of boundless solidarity and hope, provided that one was fortunate enough to see it. This was a utopian image, so it did not appear on
the screens, or in the pages, of the imperial Broadcast. For the majority
of world citizens who restrict their knowledge of human affairs to corporate or state media, the demonstrations were invisible.
But behind that cancelled image of power in the streets was another
kind of power, a virtual power that was also invisible the conversation on the Internet that made the demonstrations possible. We all
know that it is this power, not the one displayed in the streets, that the
masters of the world fear the most.
The World Wide Web has been available to a minority of the worlds
population for about eleven years, and digital tools of audiovisual production, best understood as integral components of the Internet, have
come to maturity only within the last few years. Thus, even though the
Internet was greeted immediately with the expected (and appropriate)
utopian discourse, we are only now beginning to feel its true power. I
say feel because there is a crucial difference between conceptual recognition and muscle recognition, between understanding and doing.
By utopian I mean that which is not permitted. The theatre of action
is the place at the root of this word that means no place. And of all
actions that are not permitted, uncontrolled conversation among the
peoples of the world is the most powerful, and the most threatening to
hegemonic authority. Conversation is the most powerful of human
322 Gene Youngblood
actions because through it we construct the realities in which we live.

We can talk about things because we create the things we talk about by
talking about them. (By talk I mean all forms of conversation including audiovisual.) It is through conversation that we define the four
basic constituents of human reality existence (whats real and whats
not), priorities (whats important and whats not), values (whats right
and wrong, good and bad), and relations (whats related to what, and
how). Conversation is generative: it brings forth worlds. The power to
do this is the ultimate power; thus, a machine that can potentially connect all of humanity in creative conversation is the ultimate utopian
machine, the machine that must not be permitted to exist.
Few today believe the hackers delusion that the Internet is invincible, that we can route around anti-democratic interventions in its
dynamic architecture; we understand that, like all utopian machines, it
is exquisitely vulnerable. The real machine is not the Internets technological apparatus but the conversations it makes possible. They are
technologies of the self, tools with which we construct ourselves as
desiring subjects (the ultimate and universal creative act), with the consequence, for example, that we take to the streets in moral outrage or
we do not. These conversations can be swiftly closed through privatization of the apparatus and the resulting options, for example, to impose
sanctions on websites and peremptory tariffs on e-mail. A minority,
driven underground, will route around such obstacles, but conversations of politically significant magnitude will be silenced and the utopian machine will no longer exist.
Yet it must exist, for it is the only machine through which we can
begin to create on the same scale as we destroy. We have always faced
this challenge, but the scale of actual and potential destruction today is
beyond historical precedent. We are called, possibly for our very survival, to a scale of creativity for which we have very little past experience. Before 2003 I could have said no past experience, but we have
since witnessed the organizing power of the Internet on a coordinated
global scale. We are learning how to use the utopian machine.
Some say the most strategic use of the Internet will be one that is
invisible that secession from the imperial Broadcast, escape from its
powers of appropriation and neutralization, is the necessary first step
toward effective counterculture. I believe this will indeed be an important, perhaps essential, aspect of what we must do; but the first step
must be exactly the opposite: we must confront neoliberal globalization
with an audacious display of the utopian machines potential power.
Afterword: What We Must Do
323
What is at stake must be made vivid in the worlds imagination. To do

this would be to force Empire into the light, to reveal it in its nakedness.
If the Internet is potentially as powerful as we say it is if there is no
power greater than global humanity interconnected in creative conversation then I say we have not even come close to acknowledging,
demonstrating, and celebrating that power in a manner commensurate
to its importance. The possible realization of humankinds ultimate
utopian dream a global democratic public sphere is in our hands,
yet we are collectively ignoring the elephant that is in the room. We
need to welcome the Internet as we would welcome the arrival on this
planet of a benign alien species with a unifying global ritual that
marks a transformation of human reality. That we have not done this is
understandable. We fear what might happen if we let the genie out of
the bottle. But we have no choice. Taking a slogan from AIDS activists,
at this historical moment silence = death.
So there must be a confrontation. A global coalition of artists and
activists must organize an event designed to demonstrate the organizing power of the Internet in the most dramatic way imaginable; an
event designed to galvanize worldwide desire for countercultural
deployment of the utopian machine and to foreclose any attempt to
contain its power. The coalition must raise millions in world currencies
to fund the project, no matter how long it takes. Five years or longer
seems likely. At the same time we must remember that nothing sells;
everything is sold. The event and the movement behind it must be
advertised in the physical world, not just in the virtual space of the
Internet. There is a sense in which something or someone does not exist
without a presence on the Internet; the coalitions promotional campaign must begin there and must emanate outward from there into the
streets, both of necessity and as a demonstration of the Internets organizing power. But this will be inadequate without a massive and simultaneous public relations initiative in the physical world. Millions must
be spent on advertising the event in every medium and venue around
the world, starting years in advance, using the same strategies of crosspromotion and cross-marketing that the imperial Broadcast uses to create and sustain global consumer culture.
The political demonstrations of 2003 were united in solidarity but
were separated in time. Historically they constituted a single event, a
turning point. They manifested the political will of a global community,
but they were not coordinated in time, and time is now the definitive
feature of unification. Space has been dissolved; only time and timing
324 Gene Youngblood
circumscribe our democratic right to peaceful assembly. The primary

purpose of the event I propose must be to make visible the invisible
power that was behind the political demonstrations. We need to match
those spectacular images of assembly in space with equally powerful
images of assembly in time images of worldwide synchronization and
coordination.
Asynchronous coordination, in which people around the world
interact with and through a common database, is important too. It is,
after all, the most common form of Internet art at this time, and it will
be a significant part of the event I propose. But global synchronization
is inspiring, dramatic, and unifying in a way that asynchronous conversation is not, and it must be emphasized to the greatest possible extent.
The event I speak of in the singular will actually be a series of daily
events in a continuous, unbroken sequence over weeks or months.
They will be of two kinds: telecollaborative multimedia performances
and multimedia teleconferences. The performances must be outdoors,
wireless and mobile, and they must emphasize telepresence as much as
possible. There must be large local audiences that see and hear each
other, and conversation between them must be enabled and encouraged. The gathered publics must not be mere spectators; they must
experience their power to constitute a worldwide public sphere in public space, outside of any institutional or domestic context.
At least five large screens must be in or around performance spaces
one for seeing and hearing the other end of a collaboration, another for
audience-to-audience conversation and spontaneous collaboration, a
third to display the local performance (as in stadium music concerts or
large conferences or trade shows) so the local audience can see what is
happening in their space. A fourth giant screen will continuously display webcam-style video transmissions from all participating locations,
cycling around the globe sequentially, one after another, from time zone
to time zone twenty-four hours a day, to establish and sustain a sense of
real-time world community. A fifth screen (or more if needed) must be
mobile.
The performances must include every kind of mobility, from walking,
running, and dancing to bicycles and motorcycles, cars, buses and vans,
trains and aircraft. The image of the van or mini-bus equipped with
audiovisual tools, transmitters, and screens is archetypal in the history
of media counterculture. In the United States such vehicles were associated with early video collectives like Ant Farm and TVTV. European
examples include Jack Moores travelling players in VW bus caravans
Afterword: What We Must Do
325
across France and Italy in the early seventies, and the Casino Container
built by the German design group called Pentagon for Documenta 7 in
1987. Recent Internet-connected examples of wireless mobility were
unveiled by demonstrators in the streets around the U.S. Republican
National Convention in New York City in September 2004. These
included wireless Internet (WiFi) connections, backpack transmitters,
various forms of disruptive guerrilla radio, micro-radio, low-power
FM, walkie-talkie, CB radio, and video cell phones. For a protest-performance called Bikes Against Bush, a wireless Internet-enabled bicycle
was outfitted with a custom-designed printing device that printed
spray-chalk messages sent from Web users around the world directly
onto the streets of Manhattan.
Wireless and radio transmissions must be interfaced as much as possible with MIDI technology for dynamic telepresence. Mobile wireless
telepresence ambient and transient, neither here nor there, appearing
and disappearing at (public) will is an elusive and mysterious form of
power that is always already everywhere and nowhere. Even though
institutions may sponsor particular telecollaborations, the events must
be staged outdoors, in streets, parks, and other public spaces. Telepresence that is outdoors, mobile, and wireless is a potent form of agency,
even if it is only metaphorical. Individuals and groups moving through
the world untethered, unfettered, and unbounded, projecting their will
and causing things to happen locally and globally this is an image of
collective force that transcends space and implodes time. If utopia is not
a place, mobile wireless telepresence is atopia a place without a name.
The teleconferences in this event must take place between experts
and ordinary people, between featured speakers and audiences. They
must be organized around themes that are relevant to the overall event
discussions of the sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and environmental implications of what is transpiring on the network as they speak.
The overarching theme of the conferences must be the challenge to create on the same scale as we destroy. Essential topics in this context are
democratic globalization, democratic world media, and world-collaborative solutions to environmental problems.
The full spectrum of audiovisual and computational technologies,
from high-end to low-end, must be integrated throughout the network
so that locations with lesser resources can participate in the global multimedia conversation. Finally, the telecollaborations and conferences
must be broadcast on TV and radio wherever possible and streamed on
the Internet.
326 Gene Youngblood
I have described a supremely utopian project that is unlikely to happen. I propose it in the spirit of Antonio Gramscis dictum Pessimism
of the intellect, optimism of the will. I am trying to start a conversation
about this idea. Is it reasonable? Is it as necessary as I think it is? Even if
it is not, it would certainly be beautiful, and it would change the world.
It would be a gesamptkunstwerk beyond anything yet realized. The mystery is why it has not been attempted.
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Contributors
Ronald Burnett was appointed president of the Emily Carr Institute of

Art and Design in 1996. He is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Academy
of Art, recipient of the Queens Jubilee Medal for service to Canada and
Canadians, Educator of the Year in 2005 in Canada, and author of over
150 published articles and three books, including How Images Think
(MIT Press, 2004, 2005) and Cultures of Vision: Images, Media and the
Imaginary (Indiana University Press, 1995). Dr Burnett is chair of the
Board of Knowledge Network, member of the board of the Learning
Development Institute, BCNet, and Vice-Chair of the Great Northern
Way Campus. He is an adjunct professor at York University, Williams
Evans Fellow at University of Otego in New Zealand, and a Burda
Scholar at Ben Gurion University in Israel. Dr Burnett received his PhD
from McGill University in communications and was the director of the
Graduate Program in Communications at McGill for many years. He
also founded the Creative Arts Department at Vanier College in Montreal and helped to develop the Film and Media Department at LaTrobe
University in Melbourne, Australia. Dr Burnetts website can be found
at http://www.eciad.ca/~rburnett.
Abigail Child is a film and video maker whose work in montage
and sound/image relations pushes the envelope of film/video with
humour and ephemeral beauty. Her recent work utilizes mixed genres
and strategies for rewriting narrative, as well as exploring public space
through memory and history. She is the author of several books of
poetry including A Motive for Mayhem, Mob, Scatter Matrix, and From
Solids, and of the book This Is Called Moving: A Critical Poetics of Film
(University of Alabama Press, 2005). She has taught film/video pro-
342 Contributors
duction and history at various schools including New York University,

Massachusetts College of Art, The Art Institute of San Francisco, Sarah
Lawrence, and Hampshire College. Since 2000, she is chair of Film/
Animation at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Stephen Crocker writes about media, social theory, and philosophy.
He is an associate professor of sociology and assistant director of the
Humanities Program at Memorial University of Newfoundland. His
work has appeared in, among other places, Philosophy Today, Topia,
Cultural Values, Continental Philosophy Review, Ctheory, and various
anthologies.
Sean Cubitt is professor and director of the Program in Media and
Communications at the University of Melbourne and honorary professor of Duncan of Jordanstone College of the University of Dundee. Previously professor of Screen and Media Studies at the University of
Waikato, New Zealand, and professor of Media Arts at Liverpool John
Moores University, he is the author of Timeshift: On Video Culture (Routledge, 1991), Videography: Video Media as Art and Culture (St Martins
Press, 1993), Digital Aesthetics (Sage, 1998), Simulation and Social Theory
(Sage, 2001), The Cinema Effect (MIT Press, 2004), and EcoMedia (Rodopi,
2005). He is co-editor of Aliens R Us: Postcolonial Science Fiction with
Ziauddin Sardar (Pluto Press 2002), The Third Text Reader with Rasheed
Araeen and Ziauddin Sardar (Continuum, 2002), and How to Study the
Event Film: The Lord of the Rings with Thierry Jutel, Barry King, and Harriet Margolis (Manchester University Press, 2007). He is the author of
many articles, chapters, papers, and catalogue essays on contemporary
arts, culture, and media. He has curated video and new media exhibitions and authored videos, courseware, and Web poetry. He is currently
researching a book on the history of techniques and technologies of
light, and acts as editor in chief of the Leonardo Book Series for MIT
Press and Leonardo/ISAST.
Greig de Peuter is a PhD candidate in the School of Communication at
Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. He is co-author, with Steven
Kline and Nick Dyer-Witherford, of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture and Marketing (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003),
and co-editor, with Mark Cot and Richard Day, of Utopian Pedagogy:
Radical Experiments against Neoliberal Globalization (University of Toronto Press, forthcoming).
Contributors
343
Nick Dyer-Witheford is associate professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at the University of Western Ontario. He is the
author of Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology
Capitalism (University of Illinois Press, 1999), and, with Steven Kline
and Greig de Peuter, of Digital Play: The Interaction of Technology, Culture
and Marketing (McGill-Queens University Press, 2003). His research
interests include analysing emergent forms of counter-power against
high technology and globalized capital, and the political economy of
the computer and video game industry.
Caitlin Fisher is a theorist, creative writer, and Web artist with broad
interdisciplinary interests. She is assistant professor at York Universitys Department of Film and Canada Research Chair in Digital Culture. Her research and teaching focus on the social and cultural aspects
of communication technologies, hypermedia, feminist theory, augmented reality, and digital multimedia work (she completed Yorks first
hypertextual dissertation in 2000). She is a founding editor of j_spot:
Journal of Social and Political Thought, an electronic journal covering a
wide range of intersections between theory, politics and political action,
aesthetics, cultural criticism, and social and economic justice. Her most
recent publication is These Waves of Girls, a hypermedia novella exploring memory, girlhoods, cruelty, childhood play, and sexuality, which
won the Electronic Literature Organizations 2001 prize for fiction.
Susan Lord is associate professor in the Department of Film and Media
and holds cross-appointments with the Departments of Art and
Womens Studies at Queens University. She has published several articles reflecting her general research interests in media and temporality,
feminist media theory and culture, Cuban visual culture, and Canadian
cinema. With Janine Marchessault, she is involved in a research project
about artists collectives and citizenship practices. Recently she coedited, with Annette Burfoot, the anthology Killing Women: The Visual
Culture of Gender and Violence (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006),
and, with Glenn Gear, Dorit Naaman, Matt Soar, and Miriam Verburg, a
special issue of Public entitled Digital Poetics and Politics: The Work of
the Local in the Age of Globalization. She is completing a book on the
late Cuban filmmaker Sara Gmez, as well as a manuscript called Sublime Machines/Time Zones.
Janine Marchessault is associate professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts
344 Contributors
and Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media and Globalization at

York University. She is the editor of Mirror Machine: Video and Identity
(YY2 Press, 1996), and co-editor of Gendering the Nation: Canadian
Womens Cinema (University of Toronto Press, 1999), and Wild Science:
Reading Feminism, Medicine and the Media (Routledge, 2001). She has
published widely on film and media studies, focusing on the historical
emergence of mechanical image technologies, notions of intermediality,
and the idea of veracity. Her most recent book is Marshall McLuhan:
Cosmic Media (Sage, 2005), and she is currently developing a book
project called Liquid World. She is the director of the Visible City Project
+ Archive (www.visiblecity.ca), as well as co-founder of the Future
Cinema Lab.
Laura U. Marks is a scholar, theorist, and curator of independent and
experimental media arts. Her current research interests are relationships between classical Islamic art and new media art, and independent
media in the Arab world. She is the author of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Duke University Press,
2000), Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minnesota University Press, 2002), and many essays. She is at work on a book prospectively titled Enfoldment and Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of New Media
Art. She has curated programs of experimental media for festivals and
art spaces worldwide. Dr Marks is the Dena Wosk University Professor
of Art and Culture Studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. Her
website is www.sfu.ca/~lmarks.
John McCullough is an assistant professor of Film Studies at York University. His current research includes the global film and television
industries (in particular labour patterns) and the politics of media representation. His critical writing has appeared in Lux: A Decade of Artists
Film and Video (YYZ Books/Pleasure Dome, 2000), CineAction, Canadian
Journal of Film Studies, Fuse Magazine, The Independent Eye, and The Canadian Review of Books. He has served on the programming board of Pleasure Dome and the editorial board of Fuse and is a founding member of
the experimental sound art collective Urban Refuse Group. He also is a
film, video, and sound artist and collector of low-tech equipment and
toys.
Joshua Oppenheimer is a filmmaker and postdoctoral research fellow
at the University of Westminster. He is the editor of Acting on Aids: Sex,
Contributors
345
Drugs and Politics (Serpents Tail/ICA, 1997), and his films include The
Decline of Industry in the Industrialized World (2007), The Globalization
Tapes (with Vision Machine, 2003), The Entire History of the Louisiana Purchase (1998), and These Places Weve Learned to Call Home (1996), as well as
the in-progress film works of Vision Machine, of which he is a member.
Sheila Petty is dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Professor of Media
Studies at the University of Regina. She edited the book A Call to Action:
The Films of Ousmane Sembene (Flicks Books, 1996) and co-edited Canadian Cultural Poesis (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006). She is especially interested in bridging art/cultural theory and practice, and this
has led to several curated film and video exhibitions such as Identity and
Consciousness: (Re)presenting the Self at Reginas Dunlop Art Gallery and
Inventions of Nation at the MacKenzie Art Gallery and the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff. She has written extensively on issues of cultural
representation, identity, and nation in African and African diasporic
cinema and new media, and has a forthcoming book on African
diasporic film and a forthcoming monograph on the TV series Law and
Order.
Kirsty Robertson is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art at
Queens University and a lecturer at the University of Toronto. Her
research interests include contemporary art and activism in Canada,
surveillance culture, cyborg theory and practice, reconciling feminist
craft theory with contemporary art practices, and post-colonial theory
and new media practice. She is presently working on a dissertation that
examines the intersections between visual culture and protest (in particular the global justice movement) in Canada.
Michael Uwemedimo is a writer, curator, and member of the filmmaking collaboration Vision Machine. Michaels latest writings appear in
Jean-Luc Godard: Documents (Pompidou Centre, 2006), Building Bridges:
The Cinema of Jean Rouch (Wallflower, 2007), and his forthcoming book,
The Interview (Manchester University Press, 2008). His recent curatorial
projects include Possessing Vision: The Cinema of Jean Rouch (ICA, 2000),
Jean-Luc Godard: A Retrospective (NFT/Tate Modern, 2001), Truth or Dare
(Whitechapel Gallery, 2006), and After the Fact (BFI Southbank, 2007).
Michael is currently research fellow at Roehampton University.
Vision Machines filmmaking focuses on re-enactments and dramati-
346 Contributors
zations by perpetrators and survivors of political violence, and investigates relationships between genocide and genre, spectrality and ghosts,
and the possibilities for filmmaking to intervene in economies of terror.
Vision Machine has worked with covert operators, paramilitary death
squads and their victims, documenting processes of dramatization and
fictional adaptation to explore not only the performance of political violence, but also the stories and images used to justify the routines of that
violence. Exploring the imbrications of memory and performance, and
working from Southeast Asia to the American desert, Vision Machine
has staged musical numbers and gangster scenes, westerns and weepies as catalysts for the actors in these terrible histories to reveal the
many ways in which history can imagine violence as heroic, and killers
as heroes.
Rinaldo Walcott is associate professor in the Department of Sociology
and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, where he
also holds the Canada Research Chair in Social Justice and Cultural
Studies. His teaching and research have been largely in the area of cultural and post-colonial studies with an emphasis on black diaspora
studies. He has published on music, film, queer theory, literature, and
theatre. His most recent scholarship branches out from black studies to
engage with other forms of marginalized difference in the Canadian
nation-making project. This new project, Other Canadians and the Remaking of the Nation, will result in the Other Canadians Database:
Culture Re-making the Nation, which will consist of film and video
made by Other Canadians. He is the author of Black Like Who? Writing
Black Canada (Insomniac Press, 1997), and the editor of Rude: Contemporary Black Canadian Cultural Criticism (Insomniac Press, 2000).
Haidee Wasson is assistant professor of Cinema, Concordia University,
Montreal. She has previously taught at the University of Minnesota, as
well as in the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies, Harvard University. As a Fulbright Scholar, she has been a visiting fellow at
the Museum of Modern Art and New York University. Her books
include Museum Movies: The Museum of Modern Art and the Birth of Art
Cinema (University of California Press, 2005) and a co-edited collection
(with Dr Lee Grieveson) on the history of film studies (Duke University
Press, 2008). She has published numerous journal articles and book
chapters on topics such as emergent technology and visual history, the
museum gift shop, museums and cinema, early home theatres, and the
Contributors
347
emergence of film archives. She has lectured internationally, addressing

topics pertaining to her research interests, which include film and
media historiography, intermediality, and cultural, visual, and media
theory. Exploring the intersection of technology, culture, and aesthetics,
she is currently working on a history of small-gauge film projectors and
portable film screens.
Glenn Willmott is professor of English at Queens University. He is the
author of articles on film theory, modernism, and Canadian literature
and of the books McLuhan, or Modernism in Reverse (University of Toronto Press, 1996), Unreal Country: Modernity and the Canadian Novel in
English (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002, winner of the Gabrielle
Roy Prize), Modernist Goods: Primitivism, the Market, and the Gift
(University of Toronto Press, forthcoming), and of the scholarly edition
of Bertram Brookers 1936 Governor Generals Awardwinning novel,
Think of the Earth (Brown Bear, 2000). His research interests include
Canadian, British, and American modernisms; comics and other modern mass culture genres; and literary and critical theory.
Gene Youngblood is an internationally known author, critic, and theorist of electronic media arts. He is the author of Expanded Cinema (Dutton, 1970), the first book about video as an art medium, which was
influential in establishing the field of media arts. He is also widely
known as a pioneering voice in the Media Democracy movement and
has been teaching Media and Democracy for thirty years. He has lectured at more than four hundred colleges and universities throughout
North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia, and his writing is published extensively around the world. He is currently professor of Critical Studies in the Department of Moving Image Arts at the College of
Santa Fe.
Index
9/11, 115, 232, 247, 253

Acland, Charles, 85, 93, 95
acoustic space, 14, 38
activism, 22, 27082
activist media, 15, 1945
Adair, Bill, 249
Adorno, Theodor W., 6, 253, 305, 311
African diaspora, 16093
Agar, Jon, 21, 2723, 282
AIDS, 323
Akomfrah, John, 1819, 1612, 1656,
168, 193
Akward, Michael, 175
Alberti (Leone Battista), 62
Alice in Wonderland, 4
Alien, 233, 263
Allen, Dede, 2512, 258, 267
Allen, John, 269
Alpha and Bravo, 23743
Al Qaeda, 232
Al-Solaylee, Kamal, 269
Amaya, 315
Americas Army, 232
Amika, 16, 96110
Anderson, Benedict, 190
Anderson, Steve, 2023, 209
Ant Farm, 324

Antin, Eleanor, 200
Antliff, Allan, 195, 208
Appadurai, Arjun, 70, 73
Apple Computers, 80
Aquinas, Thomas, 12
archeological performances, 19
Arendt, Hannah, 62, 72, 247
Aristotle, 12
Arriflex, 38
Ars Electronica Festival, 53, 270
Artaud, Antonin, 297
Arzner, Dorothy, 258
Association of British Columbia Animation Producers, 262
As We May Think, 146, 157
Augustine, Saint, 12
Avid editing system, 120, 2579
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 284, 2946
Balides, Constance, 91
Banham, Reyner, 46
Barber, Karin, 110
Barlet, Olivier, 110
Barthes, Roland, 197, 208, 211
Baseball Hall of Fame, 112
Bataille, Georges, 311
350 Index
Baudelaire, Charles, 13
Baudrillard, Jean, 67, 73, 213, 257,
268, 314
Bauman, Zygmunt, 4, 5, 23
Bazin, Andr, 29, 48, 85, 95
B.C. Film Commission, 261
Beatles, The, 58, 61
Beckett, Samuel, 215
Belton, John, 92
Benjamin, Walter, 6, 911, 14, 22, 115,
188, 197, 208, 264, 275, 282, 294,
302, 304, 31819
Benning, James, 199
Bergson, Henri, 22, 54, 56, 635, 689,
71, 73, 2867, 2917, 302
Berland, Jody, 268
Berne Convention, 318
Berners-Lee, Tim, 315, 319
Bernstein, Michael Andr, 199
BET (Black Entertainment Television), 160
Bhabha, Homi, 143, 194, 201, 2089
Bikes Against Bush, 325
bin Laden, Osama, 237, 240
Birnbaum, Dara, 113, 125
black: body, 170, 173; music, 16093
Black Audio Film Collective, 193
Black Skin White Mask, 175
Blair, Kristine, 18, 148, 158
Bland, John, 32
Blue Window Pane, 1389, 141
Bhlen, Marc, 141
Bolter, Jay David, 140, 314, 319
Boole, George, 304
Bordwell, David, 92
Bradley, Steve, 278
Braidotti, Rosi, 155, 159
brain drain, 261
Breashears, David, 83
Brooks, Sawad, 310, 319
Brownlow, Kevin, 268

Bubbes Back Porch, 150
Buck-Morss, Susan, 11, 25
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 5
Bugs Life, A, 2589
Bukatman, Scott, 257, 268
Burke, Edmund, 85, 87, 95
Burke, Jeff, 137
Burroughs, William S., 58
Burston, Jonathan, 248
Bush, George Walker, 245, 325
Bush, Vannevar, 146, 157
Cage, John, 15, 5862, 645
Calloway, Cab, 174
Calyx Retrospective, 145
Camara, Serigne Mbaye, 109
Cameron, James, 290, 302
Camus, Albert, 215
Canada 67, 34
Canadian Film Centre (CFC), 280
Canadian film/media industries, 21,
50, 25169
Canadianization, 2523
Canadian televison, 267, 329
Canclini, Nestor Garcia, 201
Candid Eye, The, 38
Carlyle, Cathy, 269
Carroll, Lewis, 4
Carter, Jimmy, 205
Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 38, 50
Casino Container, 325
Cassidy, Eric J., 108
Castells, Manuel, 271, 274, 282, 307,
319
Catch-22, 216
Cauris, 99, 109
CAVE (Cave Automatic Virtual Environment), 138
CBC-TV, 38, 2656
Index
cell/mobile phone, 15, 212, 523, 62,
27082, 2846, 288, 295, 299300
Cell-Outs and Phonies, 279, 283
Czanne, Paul, 13
Chakar, Tony, 2067
Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 201, 209
Challenge for Change, 47
Changeux, Jean-Pierre, 140
Chaplin, Charles, 33
Chicago, Judy, 145, 148
Chion, Michel, 56, 645, 723
Chiron, Julie Ann, 158
Chroma-Key, 8
CHUM-CITY, 256
CIA, 178, 185, 1901, 2045
Cincera, Raduz, 34
cin-criture, 9
Cinesphere (Ontario Place), 83
Circle Vision, 31
City of Gold, 40
Clark, Danae, 268
Clear Channel, 5
CNN, 54, 120, 187, 232, 236, 256
coeval temporality, 2023
Colby, William, 1856, 204
Collingwood, R.G., 35, 50
Collins, Richard, 252, 267
Columbine massacre, 246
computer-generated image (CGI),
252
Connearn, David, 310
Cooperation of Parts, 200
Corrinne, Tee, 145
Coyne, Richard, 140
Crandall, Jordan, 231, 240, 242, 2489
Crary, Jonathan, 72, 289, 3012
Cribb, Robert, 1901
Cronenberg, David, 227
Cubitt, Sean, 97, 108, 198, 208, 210,
217, 219, 225, 227
351
Cunt Coloring Book, 145

CUSeeMe, 316
Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the TwentyFirst Century, 147
Cyberspace, 96, 215, 276
Cyborg, 156, 161, 31213, 317
Dabo, Mamadou Fall, 109
Dakar Web, 16, 98101, 108
Daly, Tom, 41, 45
Daney, Serge, 1978, 209
Danto, Arthur, 311
Daouda, Moudjibath, 99, 109
Dash, Julie, 193
Data Thief, 19, 1689, 173
Davies, Char, 129
Davis, Jim, 21213, 216, 226, 330
Davis, Mike, 235, 249
Davis, Miles, 164
Davis, Sammy Jr, 174
Dead Weight of Quarrel Hangs, The,
206
Dean, Howard, 116
de Antonio, Emile, 20, 193, 195
Debord, Guy, 253
Deck, Andy, 319
deep media, 20, 21112, 2256
Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency (DARPA), 232
Delany, Samuel R., 170
Deleuze, Gilles, 14, 54, 56, 656, 68
71, 73, 1979, 209, 248, 250, 286,
290, 297, 302, 307, 31314, 319
Dement, Linda, 156
Department of Defense Game Development Community, 232
Der Derian, James, 2312, 248, 330
Descartes, Ren, 63
de Souza e Silva, Adriana, 2756, 282
Diallo, Sa, 109
352 Index
Dialtones, 270, 277, 282
Diamond, Sara, 20, 193, 1956, 208
Diankha, Rackie, 109
Diapolyecran, 31
Diba, Viye, 109
Dibbell, Julian, 215, 21718, 227
Dickens, Charles, 33
Dietz, Steve, 309
digital aesthetics, 14, 17, 23, 126, 145
57, 21026, 229
digital artwork 15, 223, 30418
digital video 17, 86, 131, 156, 189
Dinner Party, The, 145, 148
Diouf, Pape Teigne, 109
Discovery Channel, 284, 2956
Disney, 34, 23, 34, 154
DJ Spooky, 170
DNA, 8
Dogme 95 manifesto, 53
Dolinsky, Margaret, 1389, 141
dome screen, 31
Don, Abbe, 150, 158
Dorland, Michael, 253, 268
Dorn, Ed, 313
DOS, 147
Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 215
Drabo, Yaya Karim, 109
Dream Is Alive, The, 83
Druckrey, Timothy, 317, 319
DuBois, W.E.B., 1634, 170, 1756
Duchamp, Marcel, 8
Dulac, Germaine, 9, 24
Eco, Umberto, 32, 314
Edelman, Gerald, 140
Edhie, Sarwo, 190
Edison, Thomas, 81, 93, 289
Edwards, Gordon, 32
Einstein, Albert, 33, 307
Eisenberg, Daniel, 200
Eisenstein, Sergei, 34, 23, 33

Eke, Maureen, 110
Ekistics, 32
Eliot, T.S., 33, 219
Elsaesser, Thomas, 24
Engels, Friedrich, 267, 269
Enthusiasm, 121
Epstein, Jean, 9
Erased de Kooning, 310
Ericsson (telecommunications company), 282
Eshun, Kodwo, 1612, 170
Estrada, President Joseph, 277
ethnic absolutism, 170
Evans, Gary, 50
Everest, 83, 86, 95
eXistenZ, 227
Expanded Cinema, 59, 11, 14, 24,
334, 4951, 346
Expo 67, 1415, 2951
Fabian, Johannes, 202, 209
Fanon, Frantz, 175
Fast and the Furious, The, 233
Faye, Vieux Mac, 109
Ferguson, Graham, 34, 83
Final Cut Pro, 132
Fincher, David, 265
Finkleman, Ken, 2645
Fiset, Edouard, 31
Fisher-Price, 245
Fisk Jubilee Singers, 164
flneur, 59, 2756
FlatWorld, 233
Flew, Terry, 319
Fordism, 231
Forsythe, Diana, 127, 140
Foucault, Michel, 21920
Fox Channel, 232, 284, 2956, 299
Frankenstein, 154, 157
Index
Frankfurt School, 294
Freed, Donald, 191
Freedman, Mark, 262
Freedom of Information Act, 205
freeSTYLE, 279, 283
Fretwork: ReForming Me, 154
Freud, Sigmund, 68, 155, 188, 191
Friedberg, Anne, 10, 24, 75, 92
Frye, Northrop, 32, 401, 43, 50, 217,
331
Fulford, Robert, 34, 49
Fuller, R. Buckminster, 8, 334, 49
Full Spectrum Commander, 233, 235
Full Spectrum Leader, 233, 235
Full Spectrum Warrior (FSW), 21, 231
48
Fung, Richard, 193
Furneaux, Sera, 315
Fusco, Coco, 198, 306, 318
future cinema, 2948
future/futurology/futurism/futurity, 8, 12, 18, 20, 22, 2948, 57, 112,
123, 1478, 155, 161, 168, 171, 174,
188, 1937, 219, 2212, 224, 233,
235, 263, 300, 308, 310, 31213, 316
18
Gabriel, Teshome, 97, 100, 105, 108,
110
Gance, Abel, 35
Gardner, Paul F., 179, 190
Gasher, Mike, 253, 268
Gaye, Anta Germaine, 109
Gehr, Ernie, 199
Gelernter, David, 311, 319
George Clinton and Parliament and
their Mothership Connection, 171
Gerbner, George, 267
Get Smart, 54
Gibbons, Scott, 53
353
Gibson, Ross, 200

Giddens, Anthony, 52, 71
Gideon, Siegfried, 32
Gilroy, Paul, 160, 168, 170, 175
Girard, Franois, 266
Gitlin, Todd, 61, 72
Glass, Philip, 53
Glassman, Marc, 501
Glimpses of the USA, 31
global Hollywood, 254, 259, 2634,
266, 269
Globalisation Tapes, The, 181, 191, 203
global positioning system (GPS),
241
global village, 4, 15, 20, 38
Gning, Assane, 109
Godel, Kurt, 114
Goldberg, Ken, 316
Goldberg Variations, The, 57, 295
Goldie, 170
Goldman, Mia, 267, 269
Gondry, Michel, 265
Goodwin, Andrew, 175
Gould, Glenn, 15, 5763, 65, 67, 71
Graham, Gerald, 38, 50
Gramsci, Antonio, 325
Grant, George, 11
Grau, Oliver, 141
Green Arts Barn event, 280
Greenfield, Gary, 141
Grin without a Cat, 195
Gromala, Diane, 314, 319
Gross, Larry, 268
Grossman, Lt. Col. David, 246, 250
Grusin, Richard, 140
Guattari, Flix, 71, 73, 248, 250, 307,
319
Guiss, Frres, 109
Gulf War, 236, 242, 251
Gunning, Tom, 489, 92
354 Index
Guyer, Carolyn, 1467, 149, 154, 157
9
Guzmn, Patricio, 196, 208
Habermas, Jurgen, 24
Habitat, 32, 47
Halbfinger, David M., 249
Hall, Stuart, 1669, 175, 269
Halliburton, 246
Hammid, Alexander, 34
Hansen, Miriam, 24
Haraway, Donna, 156
Hardt, Michael, 9, 24, 231, 2478, 250
Hardwick, Gordon, 260
Harris, Bernard, 172
Harry Potter, 5
Harvey, David, 2578, 268
Harwood, Graham, 20, 21921
Havelock, Eric, 12
Hawthorne, Susan, 14950, 158
Hayles, Katherine, 60, 72, 141
Hebdige, Dick, 168, 176
Hegel, Georg W.F., 13, 58, 312
Heidegger, Martin, 62, 68, 314
Heim, Michael, 96, 108
Heisenberg, Werner, 8
Highmore, Ben, 49
Hillis, Ken, 140
Hiroshima Mon Amour, 198
historical excavation, 181
historiography, 92, 2046, 208
History Channel, The, 195
histrionic reconstruction, 181
Holmes, Steven A., 249
holographic cinema, 30
Holzman, Steven, 141
Horkheimer, Max, 253
Hornstein, Shelley, 268
Hours, The, 53
HTML, 150, 314
Humewood Communications, 261

Hussein, Saddam, 232, 237
Husserl, Edmund, 65
Hutcheon, Linda, 149, 158, 159
Huyssen, Andreas, 192, 1945, 197,
208
IBM, 8, 31, 49
Idea of North, The, 61
Idris, Kemal, 177, 190
IFILM, 93
Ihde, Don, 72
Iliad Project, The, 1378
ImaHima, 276
IMAX, 14, 16, 38, 47, 77, 8391, 945
immigrant, 22, 284300
imograph, 17, 12641
Indonesian massacres, 1920, 17890,
193, 2023
Indymedia.org, 1945, 197
Innis, Harold, 11, 13, 25
Institute for Creative Technologies
(ICT), 2323, 235, 2456, 249
Inter Society for Electronic Art
(ISEA), 99
iPod, 6
Irigaray, Luce, 156
Its Name Was Penelope, 152
Its Not My Memory of It, 205
Iwai, Toshio, 2201, 227, 314
Izme Pass, 147, 157
Jackson, Michael, 165, 174
Jackson, Shelley, 147, 154, 157, 159
Jackson Five, 174
Jacob, Ken, 200
Jameson, Fredric, 61, 678, 723, 253,
268
Javascript, 314
Jenkins, Henry, 56, 24
Index
Jennings, Pamela, 101, 108, 110
Johnson, Dan, 261
Johnson, Steven, 108
Johnson-Eilola, Johndan, 155, 159
Joint Vision 2020, 2334, 249
Jonze, Spike, 265
Joyce, James, 33, 147
Joyce, Michael, 147, 157
Julien, Isaac, 193
Kac, Eduardo, 316
Kahn, Douglas, 72
Kaleidoscope, 31
Kant, Immanuel, 311
Kaplan, Nelly, 50
Karwas, Dana, 279, 283
Katz, John Stuart, 268
Khbeiz, Bilal, 206
Kinder, Marsha, 208
Kinetoscope, 81, 289
Kino-Automat, 31, 34
Kissing Booth, 315
Kittler, Friedrich, 54
Kleenex, 112
Kline, Stephen, 248
Klinger, Barbara, 923
Klubock, Thomas Miller, 197, 208
Knight, Arthur, 162, 175
Kodak, 93
Kolko, Beth, 161
Korris, James, 24950
Kracauer, Siegfried, 911, 24, 38, 50
Kraftwerk, 167
Kroitor, Roman, 30, 401, 467, 50
Kroker, Arthur, 25
Kubelka, Peter, 121
Kuma Reality Games, 232
Kyotopolis, 20, 2223, 227
Labatts, 253
355
Labyrinthe, 15, 302, 401, 43, 468, 83

Labyrinth Project: Expo 67, 1415,
2948, 83; USC, 200
Lait Miraculeux, 99, 109
LambdaMOO, 20, 215, 21718, 221
Landis, Fred Simon, 191
Landow, George, 157, 159
Lang, Fritz, 33
Lapses and Erasures, 310
Larsen, Deena, 1534, 158
Lasseter, John, 258
Last Angel of History, The, 16093
Lebanese wars, 193, 2056
Lee, Spike, 265
Lee Scratch Perry and his Black Ark,
171
Lefebvre, Henri, 12
Lefebvre, Michel, 99, 1089
Lehmann, Jael, 152, 158
Leibniz, Gottfried, 6570
Lemoyne, Roy E., 32
Lenoir, Tim, 248, 334
Level Five, 20, 2212
Levin, Golan, 270
Levin, Thomas, 11, 24
Lvy, Pierre, 96, 108
LeWitt, Sol, 314
Lialina, Olia, 153, 158
Lieberman, Rolf, 15, 58, 64
Life after Wartime, 200
Linklater, Richard, 131
Linux, 315
Lipsitz, George, 176, 335
liquid modernity, 45, 20
Living Tomorrow, 2001
L, Ndary, 16, 98, 109
Longfellow, Brenda, 2667, 269
Lord, Susan, 218
Low, Colin, 30, 32, 401, 43, 45, 47,
501
356 Index
Lucasfilm, 252
Ludruk (theatre), 184, 186, 204
Lukcs, Georg, 294
Lull, Ramon, 304
Lumire brothers, 318
Lunenfeld, Peter, 21920, 227
Lynn, Victoria, 201, 209
Lyotard, Jean-Franois, 67, 73, 177,
190, 311
Macedonia, Michael, 233, 238, 245,
248
Magder, Ted, 253, 268
Malloy, Judy, 146, 152, 1578
Maltby, Richard, 745, 91, 93
Man with a Movie Camera, 121
Man without a World, The, 200
Man Machine, The, 167
Manovich, Lev, 91, 934, 1257, 140
Marble Springs, 153
Marchessault, Janine, 218
Marker, Chris, 20, 1956, 2212
Marley, Bob, 174
Martin, Juliet, 154, 159
Marx, Karl, 57, 68, 211, 226, 267, 269,
318
Marx Brothers, 33
Marxist/Marxism, 197, 213, 226, 272,
294
M.A.S.H., 216
Massumi, Brian, 2367, 24950
Matrix, The, 94, 132, 216, 233
Mattelart, Armand, 319
Mauss, Marcel, 211
May, Christopher, 319
May, Derrick, 162, 170, 1723, 175
Mayer, Andre, 269
Maynard, Patrick, 141
Mbaye, Massamba, 16, 98, 109
M Butterfly, 227
McCarthy, Anna, 76
McGovern, Catherine, 99, 109
McLuhan, Marshall, 4, 8, 1115, 20,
23, 25, 29, 312, 345, 38, 46, 4851,
5663, 65, 68, 72, 21011, 2234,
226
McRobbie, Angela, 176
memory, 15, 1819, 467, 81, 123, 138,
143, 147, 149, 151, 174, 17790, 192
207, 21920, 222, 2917, 302, 310
Menand, Louis, 62, 72
Mercer, Kobena, 165, 175
Meredith, George, 198, 306
Merians, Laura, 283
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 10
Merrell, Floyd, 287
Metissacana (Senegal), 99
Metropolis, 33
Michener, Wendy, 43, 50
Microsoft: corporation, 24, 246, 310;
Windows, 147; Word, 133, 135;
Xbox, 235
Microworlds, Sirens and Argonauts,
137
MIDI, 325
Military Operations in Urban Terrain
(MOUT), 235, 238
Miller, Toby, 269
Millhouse, 195
Milosevic, Slobodan, 237
MIMENET, 2313
Minh-Ha, Trinh T., 152, 193
Mitchell, William J., 141
modernity, 4, 6, 910, 18, 20, 22, 31,
143, 162, 164, 1702, 193, 197, 201
2, 208, 227, 308, 311, 316
Molsons, 253
montage, 13, 1878, 1956, 198, 201,
3056, 315
Montreal Film Festival, 29
Index
357
Monument for the Old World (Denkmal

fur die alte Welt), 121
Moore, Jack, 324
Moport.com, 277
Morris, Peter, 21, 267
Morris, William, 216
Morse, Margaret, 307, 318
Moses, Daniel David, 20, 2223, 227
Mother Millennia, 151, 158
Motorola, 282
Moulthrop, Stuart, 154, 159
Moviola, 112, 132
Mowlana, Hamid, 267
Mr Bungle, 20, 215, 21719, 221
Mr X, 265
MSN Messenger, 52
MTV, 160
MuchMusic, 160
MUD, 21518
Muir, Adam, 248
Muller, Carol, 110
Mullican, Matt, 116
multiscreen (projections), 31, 43
Multitude, The, 9
Murch, Walter, 60, 64, 72
murmur project, 278
Murray, Janet, 140
My Body: A Wunderkammer, 147
My Boyfriend Came Back from the War,
153
Mydans, Seth, 190
Myers, Toni, 83
My Neck Is Thinner than a Hair, 206
National Film Board of Canada

(NFB), 30, 389, 43, 45, 47, 501,
266; Unit B, 15, 301
Ndiaye Diadji, Iba, 100, 10910
Ndiaye, Fatou Sow, 109
Negri, Antonio, 9, 24, 231, 247, 248,
250
Nelson, Joyce, 268
Newland, Marv, 2512
Newman, James, 249
New Partnership for Africas Development (NEPAD), 989, 109
New Rulers of the World, The, 190
Newsroom, The, 265
New York Police Department
(NYPD), 237
Ng, 113
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68, 210, 2201,
2245, 227, 297
Nintendo, 242, 292
Nokia, 282, 299
Nrretranders, Tor, 127, 140, 288,
301
Nowhere to Hide, 233
NAFTA, 307
Nakamura, Lisa, 161
Napoleon, 35
narrative geography, 189
NASA, 281
NASDAQ, 86
Pandemic Studios, 235, 2456

Paquette, Andrew, 245
Patchwork Girl or A Modern Monster
by Mary/Shelley and Herself, 154,
157
Pause, 121
Odin, Jaishree, 158

OKeeffe, Georgia, 145
Okpewho, Isidore, 110
ONeill, Pat, 200
Ophls, Marcel, 18788
Oppenheimer, Joshua, 2024
Ortiz, Fernando, 201
Orwell, George, 256
358 Index
Peirce, Charles Sanders, 22, 2868,
2917, 299300, 3023
Pendakur, Manjunath, 253, 268, 337
Pentagon, 205, 2323, 235, 246
performance, 47
Persaud, Nalini, 195, 208
Petit Pagne, 99, 109
Petry, Martha, 147, 157
Petterd, Robin, 141
phantasmagoria, 910, 54
Photoshop, 133, 135, 309
Piaget, Jean, 114, 125
Pilger, John, 190
Pink Floyd, 61
Pixar, 252, 264, 268
Plant, Sadie, 147, 157, 159, 276
Plato, 55
Poch-Goldin, Alex, 267
Pokmon, 5, 221, 2912, 2935
Polar Express, 94
Polar Life, 34
Polyvision, 31
postmodern, 68, 163, 170, 171, 212,
226, 31718
Power in Motion: Capital Mobility and
the Indonesian State, 190
Prince (the artist now known again
as), 174
projection, 8, 31, 38, 46, 78, 83, 90, 93,
111, 123, 136, 225, 312
QuickTime, 14, 16, 77, 808, 94;
screens, 15
Quintas, Eva, 99, 109
Raad, Walid, 20, 193, 194, 199, 204,
205, 206, 207
Rabinovitz, Lauren, 92
race memory, 19, 170, 174
Rama, Angel, 201
Rathburn, Eldon, 45
Rauschenberg, Robert, 310
Recombinant History Project, 200
Red Violin, The, 2667
Reed, Ishmael, 170
Regan, Ronald, 1778
Rehearsal of Memory, A, 20, 21920,
222
Reinsel, Joe, 278, 283
Renault, Mary, 41
Resnais, Alain, 198
Resonance of Four, 314
Revolution in Military Affairs
(RMA), 234
Richards, Kate, 200
Rigsby, Jeremy, 125
Rist, Pipilotti, 86
Robinson, Stanley Kim, 214, 226
Rochijat, P., 191
Rodowick, D.N., 313, 319
Rogoff, Irit, 279, 281
Rouvelle, James, 278
RTMark, 315
Ruby, Jay, 268, 332
Russolo, Luigi, 59, 72
Ryan, Marie-Laure, 141
Safdie, Moshe, 32, 47
Sale Away, 277, 282
Samphan, Khieu, 1778
Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts, 154
Sankofa Collective, 193
Sassen, Saskia, 307, 319
Schaffer, Pierre, 56, 65
Schapiro, Miriam, 154
Schiller, Herbert I., 267
Schmidt, Sarah, 2679
Schneeman, Carolee, 8
science fiction, 35, 161, 170
Index
Scott, Peter Dale, 1901
Scott, Ridley, 263
screens, 5, 7, 16, 301, 335, 39, 438,
51, 7480, 824, 86, 901, 935, 117,
1312, 136, 138, 173, 201, 218, 305,
321, 324, 339
Seck, Madick, 16, 98, 109
SEED Collective, 2801, 283
Sembne, Ousmane, 108, 110
Sensory Environments Evaluation
program (SEE), 233
Serres, Michel, 546, 61, 6973
Shakar, Gregory, 53
Shannon and Weaver, 307
Shatnoff, Judith, 31, 49
Shaw, George Bernard, 33
Shepperson, Arnold, 110
Shine, Anthony, 32
Shive, Adam, 137
Shock and Awe, 232
Signal Germany in the Air, 199
Sim, Agueda, 137
Simpson Fletcher, Yael, 195, 208
Simpsons, The, 260
Singer, Ben, 93
Siskind, Jacob, 49
situationists, 253, 314
SKG, 75
Skoller, Jeffrey, 199200, 209
Slane, Andrea, 152, 158
slaves/slavery, 170, 297
Smith, Daniel W., 73
Smith, Michael Peter, 24
Snake River, 1803, 2034
Snow, Michael, 58
Sobchack, Vivian, 77, 912, 94
Soja, Edward, 12
Sontag, Susan, 65, 73
Sony, 132, 232, 235, 2456
Sorrow Songs, 1634, 170
359
Sow, Alpha, 109

Space-Frame Fair, 31
SpaceStation 3D, 83
Spacewar, 232
Spark, Nick T., 268
Speculative Archive for Historical
Clarification, 193, 199, 2045
Spielberg, Steven, 154
Sputnik, 35, 62
Stack, Michael, 21213, 216, 226
Stanton, Andrew, 258
Star Trek, 30, 116
Star Wars, 94
Steenbeck, 17, 112, 132
Stein, Jared, 137
Stevens, Wallace, 15, 401, 50
Stewart, Susan, 879, 95
Stockwell, Stephen, 248
Stoppiello, Dawn, 151, 158
Storyspace, 147
Straw, Will, 91
subaltern, the, 19, 170, 192
Sun Ra and his Arkestra, 171
Super Smart, 279
Sy, Djibril, 109
Synchronicit, 152
Tajiri, Rea, 193
Takayoshi, Pamela, 18, 148, 158
Talbott, Charlie, 205
Talibs, 99, 109
Tarantino, Quentin, 314
Tate, Greg, 19, 170
Taxpayers for Common Sense,
245
Telegarden, 316
Teleporting an Unknown State, 316
Terminal Time, 199, 200, 2023
Third Generation: A Website Project on
Family Photographs and the Rhetoric
360 Index
of Memories of Nazi Germany and the
Holocaust, 152
Thompson, Clive, 227
Thompson, Francis, 34
Thompson, Kristen, 2601
Thompson, Robert Farris, 176
Thomson, Douglass H., 158
THQ Inc., 235, 2456
Tiananmen Square, 115
Time Warner, 5
Tine, Moussa, 16, 98, 108
To Be Alive, 34
Tomaselli, Keyan, 110
Toop, David, 162
Toronto Explorations Group, 32
Total Recall, 233
Toy Story, 264
Tracing the Decay of Fiction, 200
Training Day, 233
transculturation, 201
trauma, 168, 174, 183, 191, 194, 2034,
208, 243
Travis, Molly Abel, 158
Troupe, Quincy, 175
Trudeau, Pierre, 47
Trudel, Pascal, 152, 158
Tsing, Anna, 24
Tufte, Edward, 141
TVTV, 324
Tyrwhitt, Jacqueline, 32
Ugo Ugo Lhuga, 220
Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank, 109
UNESCO, 109
Universe, 40
Unkrich, Lee, 2589, 268
Urban Peasants, 200
URBANtells, 278, 283
Utopia, 199
Uwemedimo, Michael, 2024
Valery, Paul, 61
Vandelman, Harry, 32
Vanlint, Derek, 2634
Vasulka, Woody, 7
Venturi, Robert, 112, 123, 125
Vertov, Dziga, 1201
Viacom, 75
video games, 138, 232, 252
Village Voice, The, 215
Viola, Bill, 137
Virilio, Paul, 246, 250, 3089, 319
virtual reality (VR), 20, 60, 128, 138,
21423, 227, 233
Vision Machine, 193, 2024
Vivendi-Universal, 75
VNS Matrix, 147
Von Trier, Lars, 53
Vukov, Tamara, 248, 250
Wagmister, Fabrian, 97, 100, 105, 108,
110, 141
Wagner, W. Richard, 59, 64, 72
Waking Life, 1312
Waldrop, M. Mitchell, 140
Walker, Dean, 48
Walker Art Gallery, 309
Wallace, Linda, 2001, 209
Warhol, Andy, 211
Washington Post, 205
water screen, 31
Way Back Machine, 309
We Are Young, 34
Webstalker, The, 315
Weibel, Peter, 7, 49
White, Hayden, 19798, 318
WiFi, 325
Wiki, 315
Wilding, Faith, 148, 1534, 158
Williams, Raymond, 29, 48
Wilson, Brian, 61
Index
Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen, 208
Winters, Jeffrey, 190
Wise, Wyndham, 501
Witchs Work Is Never Done, A, 154
WNBC, 119
WOE, or a Memory of What Will Be,
147
Womens Labour History Project,
193, 195, 208
Woolf, Virginia, 53, 63, 6570, 723
World Lesbian Biography, 151, 158
Wundt, Wilhelm, 289
361
Wynter, Sylvia, 169

Xbox, 235. See also Microsoft
Xerox, 118, 134
Yale, Joel, 49
Young, Stacey, 283
Youngblood, Gene, 78, 11, 33, 35,
467, 4951
Zimmerman, Patricia, 93

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FL U I D S C R E E N S , E X PA N DE D C I N E M A

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Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema

JANINE MARCHESSAULT AND SUSAN LORD

Printed on acid-free paper

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its

Multi-Screens and Future Cinema: The Labyrinth Project at

Sounds Complicated: What Sixties Audio Experiments Can Teach

The Networked Screen: Moving Images, Materiality, and the

The Iterative Circle: Transformation of Web Narrative in

Handcrank That Globalism: A Digi-Dialogue

From Photography to Imography: New Media as Metaphor

PART II. DIGITAL TIME ARCHIVE

9 History and Histrionics: Vision Machines Digital Poetics

10 From Sequence to Stream: Historiography and Media Art 192

PART III. LIQUID SPACE MOBILITY

16 Precepts for Digital Artwork

Afterword: What We Must Do 321

We wish to express our deepest gratitude to our contributors, who

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4 Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

6 Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

Jenkins also points to the social or organic aspect of convergence. This

are transforming the semiotic fabric of contemporary visual cultures.

Through his intellectual collaborations with artists Peter Weibel and

8 Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

to this first extensive study and theorization of new media in terms of a

The imagination of an expanded global public sphere, not unlike what

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

is cleansed of its multidimensionality so that the eye is trained to look in

Kracauer, like Benjamin, saw in the overlap of art, technology, and

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and

It is the living vortices in Inniss research that no doubt influenced

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

culture in terms of a new construction of space-time relations. He drew

digital technologies: feminist and activist media projects, new forms of

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

lytical frame to take account of the cinema in terms of its connections to

combines both African oral traditions with the interlacing capability of

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

cott, the cybernetic does not appear as an external spectacle but as a

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord

5 For critiques of globalization as cultural flow, see Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing,

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In this first section, spatial narratives and screen technologies are

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1 Multi-Screens and Future Cinema:

Media histories are located across a variety of artistic and industrial

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67 31

Sainte-Hlne) offered something unique in the way of urban design: a

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67 33

to the Expanded Cinema University, that is, to universal knowledge.

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67 35

experimental media art, Youngblood posits synesthetic cinema as a

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67 39

Labyrinthe originated from Colin Lows idea for an in situ film. As he

The Labyrinth Project at Expo 67 41

The architecture designed to house the multi-screen presentation