Either Side of an Empty Room (Horvath, 2002)

The Presence of Absence (Horvath, 2003)

I want to look at some lesser known but very important multichannel video work by West Coast artist Peter Horvath. His work very elegantly challenges the boundaries and delineates concepts of the multiple frame and the out of frame, 2&1/2 dimensional space, and two dimensions of media unconscious– the filmic unconscious and the digital.

Horvath pioneered a connection between computer windows and multichannel video. Using computer language ‘aplets’ he created websites that worked like projectors– a single durational multichannel video is presented beginning to end using different-sized pop-up windows spaced through the screen and on top of eachother.

A few immediate observations:

These works strip the computer windows medium of its interactivity. Like the cinema projector: somewhere, back there, a machine is counting down to make all this happen at the right time—except here, it is somewhere ‘in there’ …some clock in the machine. All the computational power of the computer has been reduced to little more than a clock with a projector– the same apparatus as the sync sound projector. What is fundamentally different is the ‘camera’ that has created this screen. We are quite aware of another level of expression for Horvath. A set of expressive tools we would connect with Design: placement and orientation of different images, composition of negative space in the black, representation of a 3rd dimension communicating what’s on ‘top’ and ‘underneath’ (interesting: do we perceptually associate computer ‘windows’ with windows? Or with their other icons ‘folders’ and ‘files’, for overlapped literal windows reveal the same single image, whereas paper retains its image even when obscured). In addition to this, there is what we could term orchestration. Composition through time of multiple resonating elements. It is not a small thing to combine these two (I speak from experience). For design might provide rules for what guides the focal point of a layer– size, color, opacity, etc.– but adding orchestration is like playing with trump cards, because surely movement and manifestation draw attention beyond all static things. In addition there’s the question of how classic in-frame montage interacts with these design elements, as well as the special durational metonymy of multichannel: these different images enduring alongside eachother. It is a baroque cinema, overflowing and over-complicated with modes of expression.

Within this mass there are some very particular expressions/gestures that he uses. The frames become strong signifying gestures: equality or difference of size and position–the ‘on top’ being the most current, the similarly framed being in relationship, simultaneity of appearance signifying correspondence. A favorite moment of mine is in an early piece, Either Side of an Empty Room. The windows making up most of the film appear on top of a large, screen-sized, black window– a sort of stage for the projections. Then at one point, the stage manifests itself as video too… a dark cloudy sky that not only envelops the other scenes pictorially, but also in the structures of signification and association… this window has acted as a base, like the physical cinema screen, and now that screen itself has transformed into part of the film. There is another level of appropriated signification. It is the use of the browser environment (something that makes us realize that these works will be significantly transformed in time as the browser, internet, and personal computer change). The control bars of the windows mark the individual filmic frames, but they also refer outside of the entire filmic apparatus to the interactive medium in which they are composed. You can still move, close, minimize these windows, though Horvath gives you no reason to. As well there is the Quicktime loading sign. A common sign– one of those fascinating signs of the computer, like the hourglass, progress bar, blinking cursor, that signifies ‘I am on’. Though the computer is not ready to render the video for human eyes, it is perceiving. Within a narrative context these signs take on a role like a visual analogue to the music cue, like the sudden low strings that precede a shot of the monster: we are told, ‘something is going to happen’. Except here it is not the director that is manifesting but the computer.

What I’d like to point out especially is that these two things– the base layer of the window and the computer sign of manifesting—are materializations of a medium unconscious. The Quicktime sign is just an inscription of what the screen black always means… the undifferentiated, the potential, the chaos from which a new frame will be cut.

Bergsonian Time and the Multiplied Image

Bergson talks of tea in sugar, one dissolving one transforming, both inter-related in his own duration. “I must wait for it to dissolve.” I like Bergson very much. I remember him as the one that pointed out so emphatically that most problems of philosophy are problems of confusing qualitative issues with quantitative. This always made me think of problems like, “Is he better than me?” “Am I loved enough?” “Am I late?” What he means is questions of space and time. Space measured, time qualitative succession… a constant manifestation of irreducible difference. So the tea and sugar and me will never be resolved in time, only transformed. I think it is this special philosophy of time that gives due respect to the significance of multiple channels in communication. What is the difference between classic cinematic montage and that juxtaposition of imagery: multiple screens? The former replaces images in space– the isomorphic space of the screen replaced in time… a chain of succession. The multichannel allows a co-existence of duration: a comparison between durations in praesentia. It evokes a metaphor-metonymy comparison. Montage is an effect of comparison of durations in abstentia; though strung together we can only compare the present shot to the ‘shadow’ of the last, all the denotative thunder passed away. Where a montaged chain forces relationships, the multichannel presents them.

What is the shot anymore?

RHETORICAL FRAMES, RHETORICAL SHOTS: Separating Space from Duration

Cinema has really stuck us with some tropes that no longer function. Teaching college students Intro to Film Production, at the beginning of the first quarter I have to define ‘jump cuts’, which means I have to define ‘shot’. I usually come up with something strangely technical and formal for such an intuitive temporal object. Something like: “The Shot, like its namesake of the gun, refers to a single pulling of the trigger… a single continuous series of frames separated only by 24th of a second of real time.” The first part sounds good– for me it evokes those Bond-gun like Super-8 cameras, where you would hold down the spring-loaded trigger, committing film (and therefore real money) second by second to what was in front of the camera. “Shooting it”… it really felt it. Much more gun-like and less surveillance than the video camera which feels more like a hose that you try to spray over everything like fertilizer or insecticide hoping for absolute ‘coverage’.

Even in film, the logical underpinnings of the shot were questionable. Shots popped in to existence either with the mechanical triggering of a set of shutters by horses’ hooves, or with the skilled regular hand-cranking of the early camera man. I think the latter. Muybridge made more of a bear-trap for time, using devices of thread and snapping boxes. It was only after having seen motion reproduced that the cameraman, and therefore The Shot, could exist. That strange process of imagining an absent (not yet found) representation while faced with its real referent… An imagination that television successfully mechanized, so now not just professional cameramen, but everyone has the experience of watching a live video mediation of an object in their video camera or cellphone screens… watching, waiting, and then committing to a recording… a ‘shot’— if you can call it that now. More like a video recording of a live mediation than a gun shot.

Maybe it is that the film camera and the cameraman’s deciding finger committed a subject to the abyss of mediation… threw him in to the unknown like Barthes’ photographic ‘click’ …murdered him. Instead now with ubiquitous televisualization we are all, already, always, dead.

But I get off track… Problems with defining the shot. As an example, let’s compare 3 famous examples of the ‘long take’: a rhetorical subset of the shot, meaning a shot meant to function as a quasi-scene-unto-itself… to perform (or relinquish) the powers of montage within a continuous duration. I think you could say the former (perform) about early long takes—Welles, Bresson, Truffaut—and the latter about contemporary trends towards ‘durational cinema’ (Jia Zhang Ke, Chantel Akerman, Claire Denis). Hitchock made “Rope” a feature film of one shot. Russian Arc, a long (too long) feature film contained the longest take in history. Children of Men contains one of the most elaborate action-sequence long takes ever seen. Each of these similar achievements mark changes in the available technology. Hitchcock—a master of tightly planning his footage of film—planned for a transitional frame at the beginning and end of every 1,000 feet of 35mm, the longest standard magazine he could load. So his camera strangely becomes fascinated with the wall every 20 minutes (a wonderful foreshadow of Antonioni who would become truly fascinated with the wall a decade later and in color). Change reels. Everyone have a smoke and use the bathroom and continue.

Russian Arc marked the new capacity to capture hours of HD video directly to portable harddrive. No more magazines and a take can go on until the drives are full. 3 hours straight through with the much lighter camera performing impressive choreography (let’s make a footnote of Timecodes, a quadrilated screen of four longtakes which marked the entrance of mini-DV, running 2 hours to tape with a quarter resolution of the 35mm screen). For me, Russian Arc lacked the tension of Rope. I don’t know if it is being a filmmaker who has known film, or if it’s the inherent aura of mechanical reproduction which now seems like the rare ‘original’ in comparison to its electrical digital replacements (offspring), but I can see the money, the commitment, in the film of Rope. I can see ‘the shot’—that finger clasped tight and sweaty for 20 minutes on the trigger. In Russian Arc it is just the best home video ever made. And then there’s a new arrival in Children of Men… a long take that consciously or unconsciously amazes our sense for production value… a scene in a car, the camera moves fluidly through the tight-packed space, 5 people in a sedan, a car comes burning out of the forest blocking the road, followed by a gang of villains. The car is put in fast reverse, motorcycles chase, they shoot the passenger in the head, blood flies everywhere. The hero throws open the car door knocking over the gunman and his motorcycle. They pull the vehicle around and escape. 10 minutes all in one take. It trounces in achievement Welles famous opening to Touch of Evil. Though less people, the complexity of stunt, make-up, camera maneuver, performers in closeup… It is like the most amazing Youtube clip ever uploaded, capturing a terrible occurrence perfectly. But though it is in representation a long take, it has been stitched together from several shots with a little digital help. Here the CG is used to help the meta-construction (the camera man, the editor) instead of the profilmic (dinosaurs). It’s not hard to imagine constructing a whole film this way (should we say, Avatar?). No longer would you need to shoot it all at once in order to represent it as if you had. That is, you don’t have to continuously shoot a continuous shot.

But, ‘Yes, yes, that’s not so different from Hitchcock’s Rope,’ you might say. Let’s take the digital long take to its extreme then; in the continuously expanding world of 3D animation, a whole film can be constructed without shots. A 3D world mapped across a timeline and then only at the last stage is a set of camera angles and moments chosen… capable of generating an infinite number of long take films. Which is, basically, what video games are. It is disappearing right down to the technological basis for the distinction ‘shot’: a capturing of regular 24ths of a second. It is now standard practice to capture more fps and throw some away. Music videos are performed for constantly running cameras, like video games, moments are not selected for mediation, they are selected from it. In a common example, with video that is fast to digitize filmmakers are now in the practice of capturing everything as one long clip with multiple cameras for doc. From this long take—more like guided surveillance than a shot—durational fragments are selected to act as the ‘shots’ in the film. Not so much chosen in the taking, but chosen from the taking. ‘Well this is not so different than the accomplished film editor’ you might say. But it is a question of degrees. As Manovich points towards, selecting from mediation has become the media process, from search engines to Reality TV.

So what does this mean for the shot?

As we move in to the perfection of representation in the digital, the ‘camera’ becomes a rhetorical construct. The camera, track, lens, grain, resolution… all the apparatus of ‘film’ are iconic rhetorical descriptors for render processes. In the 3D animation software Maya, an animator will select the ‘camera position’, ‘movement’ (yes, even movement is in essence rhetorical, instead what is being selected is ‘desired representation of perspectival motion’), depth of field of the ‘lens’, and so on. At this stage, these elements frequently reference cinema apparatus—though there are also new and old aesthetic traditions, ‘Superflat’ derived from 2D animation, new combinations of 2D and 3D, and others—and through this correlate referentials to human perception (such things as the 50mm lens for 35mm film plane and the 1/50th second shutter being good approximations of the human perceptor apparatus). That is, the Maya constructed shot shows its true nature as a rhetorical apparatus of perspective. A simulate of how something is being seen— from where, through what. If we describe the frame as a delimiter of the perspectival mediation, then the shot is the durational correlate to the frame.

So what about the frame? Cinema, in its desire to commodify and regulate a process, simplified the perception of the frame. Like montage (or really more than ‘like’ because the frame is a necessary element of montage), the frame came on the scene as a totally new yet somehow intuitive mode of representation. Half art, half eye, the cinemas aligned the edges of the screens with the edges of the frames, with regulation of aspect and moveable curtains, creating a wonderful correlate between the real and the imaginary in the theater. The screen was a holistic analogue of the Film. What was inside the film was inside the screen and vice-versa (a regularity that Expanded Cinema and Intermedia Theater sought to break apart). Filmmakers played with windows, doorways, and mirrors in the pro-filmic to lightly give a self-reflexivity within the frame. But beginning with television, technology complicated the screen. The screen as a reflective object—more a part of this world than of the mediated—now seems quaint, like paper soon will. In television the screen became the end of a technological tube, in its primary state one end of a live circuit with a camera at the other. No longer an object the mediated is shown on to, the screen of the television is something that pushes the mediated on to you (I think of the anxious photos of tv-watching children glowing in the cathode-tube rays in the 70′s). And instead of embedded in an architecture and a process, television was embedded in an object, allowing for a multiplicity that has been greatly complicated again with the digital screen. As Lev Manovich states, the pixel-based screen is inherently broken up. The cinema apparatus may have lent itself to the singular frame or not, but it seems evident that the computer apparatus lends itself to the fractured frame. From the earliest GUIs, layers of windows have been used, and this seems to be further progressing in dimensions— the current movement is towards a development of the dimension of scale in the iPhone. As well, the borders, utility, and distinction of screens has heterogenized. We hardly think of LED and bitmap liquid crystal displays that give us readouts on cars, busses, calculators, watches, billborads, highway signs, as screens. Video is embedded in phones and computers, game consoles, home theaters, music players… People are becoming quite used to multiple screens simultaneously communicating from heterogeneous sources and contexts, and within these screens frequently multiple frames relating to the screen as master frame/context.

Take, for example, a comparison of traditional single-channel cinema and a multi-screen narrative work by Elisa-Lisa Ahtilla—one of the pre-eminent artists working in the area of cinematic video art. Consolation Service is designed for 3 screens. We could choose to describe the simultaneous content of the screens in terms of Eisenstenein montage but montage does not entirely fit. If we think of the classic examples of filmic montage, Kulishev’s experiments intercutting images of different women’s body parts to make a new whole, or intercutting the same shot of an actor’s face with different objects to create human expression— these experiments don’t really function in multichannel. If, instead of cut together they are assembled together on the screen in contiguous multichannel duration, there is no doubt that screens put up against eachother resonate—contaminate eachother with meaning—but they do not occupy the same frame, and could continue to not combine, become metaphor instead of simile, carry the momentum from the ‘shadow’ of the preceding shot… ‘montage’. That is, they could continue to never resolve into a new woman or a new expression. It is the phenomenological difference between switching channels and multi-channel where switching channels is a ‘dipping-in’ to a conceived multiplicity and multi-channel is that multiplicity. Eisenstein’s rhythmical montage might remain a rhythmical resonance. Intellectual montage, intellectual resonance, and Parrallel montage the normal elemental state of the multichannel. If we look at Ahtilla’s work, the most common organization of channels is this norm, parrallel (what McCloud would call ‘Aspect to Aspect’ in comic books). It is something we are completely familiar with from video surveillance: multiple perspectives of the same figure or scene. But we do find as well multiple channels as the metaphoric, the illustrative, and the scene to scene (where one screen has as-if moved ahead of the others on to the next scene).

Deleuze analyzed the traditional cinema frame most elequently in his analysis in terms of rational and irrational, open and closed sets. If we take the traditional cinema screen at any instant of the film, the screen delimits the closed set of the profilmic: that which is seen. This closed refers directly to the open whole of the film: the diegetic, the large context of the film which is infinite, yet doesn’t include all things… the world in which the story takes place… what can possibly be cut to. This potential open whole can be discovered by the frame at moment— the camera might pan to reveal the other side of the room, or the shot might cut to reveal another scene of the film—yet regardless the frame will always only be a piece of this open whole, and in any finite duration of film will always be partial, quantifiable (every frame could be printed and analyzed), closed. So he describes the narrative of the film to happen in this world that is never completely seen, and we only perceive the open whole as the area of imagination and identification… the place inside the viewer’s head that the film ‘happens’. Outside of this set is the irrational— that which cannot be reconciled with the film world. There are common occurrences of this in standard cinema… the preview, the credits, to a lesser degree the soundtrack, as well as the more esoteric as put forward by Deleuze (the non-sequiter Time Image cut and so on).

But what about the multi-channel? It cannot be described as a simple multiplication. It is not simply any single sets at once. It is phenomenologically different. The multi-screen is inherently irrational—like cubism… like the cut… a constant cut… a selected juxtaposition imposed from the outside. There is some imagined frame entering these smaller frames— a set of these sets that is also contained by the film. The frames are never fully reconciled—the pieces taken from the whole in some ways arbitrary, in some ways overpowering its denotation… more resonance than can be contained.

This brings us to the rhetorical. Because what do these frames do— what do they signify? These things that began as mechanical necessities: shot, cut, frame are now revealed as just how we want to represent and especially interface with human perception. About our attention and perspective. What is watched, what is separated out. Our visual language.

a swatch of standard digital camo

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.

digital and analogue

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.

This reminds me of Barthes... particularly his affection for the fake beards in Ivan the Terrible

A desperate western interpretation... Photoshop-Tricks of Humanism.

The opening ceremony of the games was similar, but molded on to a staged performance— really astonishing in its novelty… a special effects film production made to be performed live, not for an audience sitting in front watching a framed screen, but sitting above, hundreds of meters away. The fluid combination of media with performance showed the continuing trajectory of media art for the stage—a hugely expanded Blue Man Group, that has come so far from Laurie Anderson in spectacle to be almost unrecognizable as the same genre of performed media, combining the novelty of technology with illusionistic stage performance, reminiscent of late 1800′s stage magic.

The show ostensibly provided a science-center like chronological tour through Chinese history, beginning with reference to the recently unearthed primitive Fou drums (and also a clear lift from one of the Blue Man Group’s epitomal pieces… drums as colored light), through Chinese early history, dynasty by dynasty: courtiers, courtesans, through to a naive expo-like future of people made of energy and floating astronauts. Curiously absent was the communist revolution, but perhaps, as the only piece of history not relegated to a symbolic life—in fact the political structure promoting and housing all other symbols—it need not be represented (looking again at the images of the ceremony, I am struck by China’s lack of inhibitions against potentially fascist imagery… in the west, such a maximal transformation of the human in to the mechanical would be immediately criticized, and would work against our delusions of humanism).

Can these symbols even be pulled apart? I wonder at the comparison to both the typical American half time show, a similar array of disconnected spectacle that seems to wish to iterate, ‘America Now!’… a performance by a pop star, a marching band, a waving flag, fireworks display, some hip hop dancers, dancing girls… and to fascist pageantry: displaying a united national history as proud and linear and homogenous… a sort of techno-Riefenstahl). Certainly it points, in part, to China’s curious relationship with it’s own history… the of-empire history that was rebelled against now repackaged as the national identity of the people… it’s very Chinese. A presentation of history as linear and unifying instead of problematic would be considered severely naive now in the West— can you imagine anywhere in America but the smallest town, dressing up it’s performers in the costumes of Paul Revere and George Washington, Indians and Pilgrims, Fur Traders, and French Merchants to perform the identity of the American nation? And yet in China, as the underdog always proving its deserved importance to the world, this is a needed communication…

That is, this show was made for us, not for them.

In short, Lev announced that he had finally broken in to the chests of the National Endowment for the Humanities and corporate sponsors to fund the study of media by returning media analysis to its sociological aspirations of the 70′s—though he didn’t put it in terms of the 70′s, instead it is a new concept that he has termed “Media Analytics” which is the new wave of criticism, he says. The brief of his argument is good: media criticism (in its more modern superficial modes… really pre-1970′s) is moored in the paradigm of broadcast media and has not updated itself, or critically dealt with the fact of the explosion of media—still treating media as a representation of culture as a sort of oligarchy, where it is assumed that a few big representations of culture are broadcast to major theaters or channels and criticism is done as example-based analysis of these few selections with at least the conceit that a survey of work has been completed. Whereas now, it is clear, that a survey of work is impossible… millions of videos, greater numbers of text publications, greater still numbers of images published— it is now impossible to claim to have viewed even a representative sample of culture’s media products. The way forward, says Lev, is to visualize the data, and basically to use algorithms and translations to look for patterns (though it seemed like many of his examples were more about creating novelty in data visualization).

My immediate critique, while listening, was obvious. First, it sounds like Media Philosopher playing at Sociology, which, in my mind, is like political demagogues playing at Sociology…. they tend to run fast and easy with the statistics and numerical sampling in favor of headlines… like Violent Video Games Cause Columbine and such. Basically I was suspicious of the newness of his new way. Second, there was a spuriousness to the conclusion about Cultural Analysis… his method seemed to assume the cultural importance of media from a broadcast model— flattening the difference between studying media and studying culture—but YouTube has not only changed the quantity of media, but its quality in relationship to culture… it is no longer so clear that studying media is the same as studying culture. Much of media no longer represents the work of an economics and an industry or group, nor does it become widely broadcast to influence a range of society.

But the most significant critique of Manovich’s talk came from an intelligent questioner at the end… a young man in the front asked, ‘Is visualization even necessary in an age when you have all the data… isn’t the perfect map a 1 to 1 representation?’ This is fundamental— a bombshell that I don’t think was recognized as a bombshell in that moment, but it pointed to the antiquity of the whole concept— the medieval quality of so much techno-utopianism in Manovich’s dream of data visualization, because isn’t his project, again, a Museo, an Encyclopedia, a representation of all data created in one unified whole for one person to interpret?

In his talk, Lev called the bulk of media criticism reactionary in its denial of the sociological methods of other social sciences and corporations… the data mining that has become the new (reverse engineering) empirical method. But what about Google Earth? A data set of everything, with no unified visualization (or any sort of translation of medium) but simply an interface of viewing any part of the dataset, anywhere, for anyone. Isn’t that the new paradigm of media? There is no more need of visualization of data, because we have all the data… instead the new need is interface to the data… the interface has replaced the visualization. I completely agree with Lev that Media Criticism has lazily abandoned its most important questions (like “does advertising work?”) in favor of using media as a stand-in for politics and theology; but the way ahead doesn’t lie with the old paradigms of the map and the Museo… because if we started building this great visualization of culture, as we modified and perfected it using every source of data available to us, we would find in its completion that we had, inch for inch, byte for byte, backed up the entire database to another harddrive.