Medialogy

Watching a segment of Bärbel Neubauer’s work-in-progress, Morphs of Pegasus tonight, I was struck by the critical reversal that had taken place in material film art– the same path that her career had itself transversed. Bärbel Neubauer’s work had existed as paint on film for years, but in the last decades had transferred to the digital realm using programs such as ArtMatic, that render animations of mathematical functions creating fractals, chaos theory shapes, and other serial animated forms. As the name implies, Morphs of Pegasus has a pan-galactic quality, frequently looking like a representation of the maximal mathematical imaginary, outer-space, animating what looks like gaseous clouds, spinning galaxies, twinkling stars, and on. It occurred to me that her work in the digital was perfect representation– unlike cinema computer-generated graphics made to look like dinosaurs, or aliens, or what-have-you, these animations were direct translations of computer mathematics– perfect representations of the code. It is what Pollock did for paint, with numbers.

[caption id="attachment_142" align="alignnone" width="205" caption="one of the astronomical seeming clouds"][/caption]

This will be the first in a series of footnotes on visual culture. …Shorter than an editorial– just a single critical reference as a sidenote to the ongoing onslaught of all things peculiar that bombard us; ripe for comment, expansion, and forgetting.

I first noticed the change to digital bitmap camouflage in the pattern of military combat fatigues at an otherwise un-noteworthy exhibition of art & war at the Whitney (which at the time made me think how incapable post-modern art is of capturing anything like the spirit of revolution). Checking the tag, I saw it was a photo of deployed Canadian troops from the previous year– but now the bitmap camouflage is used by all major military. The purpose is obvious. Camouflage once functioned to blend the wearer in with the analogue information of light and dark of the human eye and its scopic enhancements. Now camouflage must mix the wearer in with other digital data, to avoid being recognized by computer algorithms, analyzing the streams of data from satellite and other surveillance, or to appear on the screen of the watching military as a possible bitmappy render error… to make the soldier look, not like debris, but literally like digital noise.

At first this seems another iteration of Baudrillard’s critique of Dessert Storm… a war of simulation like video games, where the soldiers and the public all experience the war as a mediated, flat phenomenon. But on second glance, this is something more sinister, more vital, and more true. We learn the truths of this new digital imaging age only as they force themselves upon us. This is no video game– it is the very real protection of life and blood of actual bodies competing in a video game. The bitmap patterns are there to trick the computer that holds the trigger. And it is a very real iteration of how our bodies and lives transformed through our growing efforts to extend them with machines become trapped within those devices we sought for empowerment. While seeking to reduce the world to readable code, our own bodies continue on in their vulnerable, binarily mortal coils, which we must wrap in a bitmap wrapper for their own survival.

The company Tunecore recently announced a promotion that would facilitate distribution for the independent film community on iTunes – for a fee, of course. It’s not the commercial aspect of this situation that interests me, however, it’s the very idea of distributing big-screen films on mobile devices. In the midst of what’s obviously a fervent rush to claim money-making territory in the industry of new media cinematic content, it seems as though no one is considering the actual size and shape of the screen image. More importantly, no one is really discussing the opportunities that arise to create fresh content rather than just shrink commercial cinema into a smaller package. The prospect of creating content for the mobile device screen seems like a perfect chance for the film and video artist to once again re-imagine the moving image, experimenting with forms ranging from narrative to structural to abstract.

Looking broadly at the situation, one can see a general trend over the past decade toward making and marketing new media—and television—projects more “cinematic”. This is a bit problematic, as the established language of cinema (or narrative cinema) is structured on a scale of communication that is subverted, or at least weakened, by the smaller scale of the personal moving image screen. It seems careless to ignore the impact of scale on visual language when creating content for these mobile devices screens, even for laptop screens or regular televisions. If commercial film content for mobile devices is being produced within the visual parameters of most commercial “cinematic” projects, then it is probably following a language of big-screen movies that is built around compositional and stylistic motifs honed and ingrained over the past five decades as a recognizable method of communication. If existing films are simply being shrunk down to iPhone size, then they absolutely follow this bigger-than-life language. The problem in applying such a particular cinematic vernacular to the small screens of mobile devices is that its fundamental impact is built upon relationships of scale that assume a screen size akin to that of a commercial movie theater. A giant Death Star is not the same as a Death Star the size of my fingernail. An enormous close-up of Klaus Kinski’s face does not carry the same visceral impact as the action-figure sized version. Even watching something inherently not commercially “cinematic”, like a handmade Brakhage film, is completely different on a mobile screen.

Is this size dynamic the reason, besides some sort of drive for social status, that people have always wanted bigger and better televisions? Is there something inherently lacking in the impact of cinematic moving images when processed through the small television or laptop screen? If so, what can be done to create content specifically for the small screen explosion, for these mobile and personal devices, that actually plays TO the scale of the interface?

I would contend that a possible solution is not, as some would argue, about interactivity, but about creating content that work with a small scale and employs a symbology of the personal. The scale of traditional cinematic language is based on something more than a personal viewpoint – something embodied, but also bigger than life and universal. The ontology of the personal screen device calls out for another language of visual representation, something small, something intimate. A language that connects with and refers to a culture of personal media identities and image-based communications, and certainly a language that takes into account the subversion of established narrative forms and temporal storytelling. Does that just mean amateur video and diarist recordings? Not really—controlled, stylized, creative content for personal screen devices would still fill a role that YouTube-style videos cannot. It would continue in the tradition of experimental film and video as a testing ground for new forms of perception and visual communication; concepts with inherently limited growth space in the YouTube structure, as most of those videos are inherently rooted in superficiality and created to be seen by way of spectacle and social exposure.

In the middle of three guys and a woman shouting back and forth about whatever comes to their minds, which are of course conveyed to us mostly by news media, this week we also heard this: Christian Science Monitor is folding. The newspaper, which is exactly 100 year old this year announced to close its print edition completely by next April, but will continue to publish online.

Shocking? Not really considering we are all expecting this. People have been talking about online publishing as the innovation “solution” for so long – the citizen journalism wave, the blogging “industry”, the open-source crowd-sourcing “freedom of publishing”. It all seems to make sense that we no longer buy a newspaper and read it on the subway when we can read the same thing on our iPhones without even polluting the planet.

But shocked? Don’t know about you, but I was. For no reason at all my first reaction was indeed, very sad. Finally. This happened. No deny that I’ve been an evangelist on technological evolution in the news industry like most people, but at that moment I found my old cynicism towards print journalism obsolete altogether. I know Christian Science Monitor would say this is good thing, a healthy piece of good news, the future of journalism, like they always bring. But it has hardly any joy in it. What’s there is three things: nobody wants to spend money on publishing, nobody wants to pay for news, which leads to — news have to be free now, voila, the Internet, the self-serving cafeteria, except that the cooks are no longer getting paid and food is no longer brought in by paid workers. Now help yourself!
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For some reason I find myself fascinated with political media coverage. Perhaps it is my own spiritual yearning, misdirected to political ends (there was an excellent article in the New Yorker questioning why we seek messiahs in our presidents, and when searching for it online, I find a surprising wealth of snarky attacks on Obama as messiah, the most complete, here). I find myself now squinting over a youTube of the Obamamercial—the half-hour spot produced for CBS last Wednesday. I try to listen to the streams of propaganda, as if a radio program, but I keep being distracted by the production choices.
Clearly expensive, this piece is a cut above infomercial but definitely lacking any media innovation. And it is another reminder—this one political—about the disconnect between art and society… the ‘Change we can believe in’ has no ramifications in the aesthetic product which is still reactionary like Obamas coat and tie (the only historical exception to this political fashion reactionary ideology is what we still love about news footage of the late 60′s… side-burns on the news commentator—a real art aesthetic going hand in hand with political movement). Instead here we have the soft-focus fascism… fields of wheat, flags, white-innocent faces… Americana alla 1945 still alive and well in the heartland. And then cut to Obama in those peculiar symbolic dens—do politicians really live in these, or are they fabricated on sound stages in D.C.? Here the furniture is definitely before Obama’s time… instead of IKEA, his study is decorated by Norman Rockwell… a big flag clashing with everything in the room.

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