Looking at an HSBC ad campaign while reading D.N. Roddowick on “the figural”

I am at the Midtown New York Public Library.  I am reading the first chapter of D.N. Roddowick’s Reading the Figural.  His concept of a ‘figural’ seems to be one of those post-modern philosophy place-holder terms for everything and nothing… ‘emergence’ ‘becoming’ ‘excess’ ‘the eternal return’… there are a lot of references to a new understanding of “visual culture,” “death drive,” dream theory, and a post-semiology framework (without frame or work, I suppose… Roddowick compares semiology to Newtonian physics failing to conceptualize relativistic thought). …The book is light on examples. I find writers like this clearly intelligent and studious, but I am never entirely certain they aren’t hacks. It is uncomfortable… either they aren’t saying anything, or I am not understanding, both of which are a little insulting. But I really like all the same people… Lyotard, Barthes, even Deleuze sometimes… so I am still reading and looking.

Roddowick quoting Lyotard:

The figural is unrepresentable, beneath or behind representation, because it operates in an other space ‘that does not give itself to be seen or thought; it is indicated in a literal fashion, fugitive at the heart of discourse and perception, as that which troubles them.  It is the proper space of desire, the stakes in the struggle that painters and poets have ceaselessly launched against the return of the Ego and the text. [p8]

It is everything.

What I call the figural is not synonymous with a figure or even the figurative. It is no more proper to the plastic than to the linguistic arts. It is not governed by the opposition of word to image; spatially and temporally, it is not bound to the logic of binary oppositions. Ever permutable—a fractured, fracturing, or fractal space, ruled by time and difference—it knows nothing of the concept of identity. The figural is not an aesthetic concept, nor does it recognize a distinction between the forms of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture. It describes the logic of mass culture itself; or rather a culture of the mass.

It is nothing.

But I am interested in the premise as given in the Preface: that in order to understand contemporary imagistic culture, we have to re-think the opposition of image to language… that we are long overdue for re-thinking Lessing’s opposition of the simultaneous arts and the successive. With the rise of ‘digital culture’ we really really need to critically deal with cinema. Roddowick relates an epiphany, when he first witnessed early MTV broadcasting and how fluidly text was spatialized and space was textualized in the productions of early non-linear digital editing and effects [3]. I am fairly certain that a host of previous examples can be found in animation, but I, too, remember the astonishment of the new form that was photographic, electric, and abstract.

Roddowick puts his ‘figural’ forward as the cornerstone of a visual studies [32-33]. I think of some more concrete tensions between text and image. Despite Eisenstein’s 1929 demand to “blow up the Chinese wall” that antithesizes the language of logic and the language of images, Visual Studies departments still find it almost impossible to create curriculums that are not text based. How can you describe a ‘methodology’ of the visual without first textualizing it? And so it goes. It is like the comic book—the art of the caption that has never made it to high culture or academia (though Barthes has pointed the way in The Third Meaning and The Photographic Message).

Outside the library on a set of billboards are some popular culture examples of the figural—or at least I take them to be examples of the figural and enjoy the spurious role of making the heady concrete. The billboards are part of a new ad campaign created by the media company Mindshare for HSBC. It is a new variation of what was an omnipresent advertising series in airports that showed two matching diptyches. In the earlier campaign, a single image is repeated with contrasting captions, and then the set repeated with the captions switched (i.e., a picture of a young man in business suit is juxtaposed with a picture of someone in torn jeans and boots; the set is repeated with these captions switched: “leader” “follower”).  It toys with the relationship of caption and image. As Barthes puts it in The Photographic Message, the caption rules the realm of connotation, which influences but cannot completely control the denotation of the photograph.  These ads play on this and our ability to recognize sameness (we can imagine how different our reading would be if the images were of the same object but different variations… i.e. a suited man with blond hair is labeled “leader,” but with brown hair is labeled “follower”).  Recognizing the image as the same, we turn our attention to how the gestalt of our perception changes with the caption– the photograph still provides expressive force to a changed message (really discourse).  Through repetition, the realm of desired reading is a meta-level: we are to be made conscious of the meaning caused by juxtaposition. It reminds me of Kulishev’s famous montage experiment, where the same film-shot of an actors face is juxtaposed with different narrative objects (a gun, a sandwich) and the audience reads the expressive force of the face differently.  We are unable to control our emotional reading though our minds recognize their manipulation.

In the new campaign, displayed on a set of four triptych billboards across 5^th Avenue, a stock photo is repeated three times with three captions, each caption pointing towards a different ‘reading’ of the object based on varying ideologies (ideologies that seem resolutely not based on class or ethnicity).

Image: the back of a bald head repeated with three captions, STYLE / SOLDIER / SURVIVOR.

Image: a field of wind turbines repeated with the captions, NATURE / FUTURE / EYESORE

Image: a fat wallet left dropped on a public floor,
MISFORTUNE / OBLIGATION / TEMPTATION

Image: a new shiny bridge against an urban night skyline,
GLORIFIED / VILIFIED / GENTRIFIED

On all appears the tagline: “Different values make the world a richer place” or “Understanding what one customer values helps us better service another”

This new campaign again plays on the tension between a textual connotation and an imagistic denotation. The images are iconic without being recognizable (we know what they are in general but don’t refer to a specific iteration) and the text is kept to a single word, working against any distinction between a ‘simultaneous’ imagistic and a ‘successive’ textual, instead forcing a meta-reading where I negotiate three image-text gestalts on the basis of a changing subjectivity… “where figure and text are engaged in a mutually deconstructive activity of a seeing that undoes saying” [Roddowick, 11].

(it is worthy of a Barthes-like pause to note that the captions are super-imposed on the pictures, further titillating the disconnect between connotative text and denotative image)

Like the previous campaign it cutely acknowledges the manipulation of captioned advertising—imposed meanings we cannot escape. And again, forced in to a meta-reading, the set of text-images taken as a whole evoke a concept of multiple subjectivities (something you could maybe term ‘diversity’ taken in its current usage to both imply variation and a positive tolerant reaction to it). But in these new ads there is more—  the tagline, “Different values make the world a richer place” or “Isn’t it better to be open to other people’s points of view?” or similar references to globalism and post-liberal moral relativism (capitalism is so fascinated with the fact that neo-liberals and corporations share these globalist ideals).  The advertisers seem to be perfectly in tune with Lyotard’s/Roddowick’s analysis of post-modernity where the figural has permanently–even dominantly–imbricated itself into the cultural discourse.  No longer in an age of the printing press, with absolute edicts, we are in the age of interconnected images, flattened, relative, global, networked… In these ads, it is the advertising image that is immutable yet changeable, and the text that must mutate towards an infinite digression to express every connotation (the dream of cultural studies).

These ads show the obscenity of the ‘figural’.

This is relativism beyond ‘tolerance’. There is the bold statement that multi-culturalism benefits all of society, and the spurious conclusion that heterogeneity helps HSBC conform its services.  It is easy to poke holes in this.  Most eloquent would be replacing the image of the bridge with the Twin Towers.  This simple substitution (which still satisfies the denotative demands of the original photo, still signifying ‘new urban’) completely exceeds the desired denotative limits of the ad.  Instead of remaining general yet iconic—really rather text-like—the image becomes extremely specific.  And it is in the specific that utopian ideals fail.  Though one might respect the general ideal of multiculturalism and all-inclusivity, it is in the specific decision to include or reject that the ideal is challenged.  “… Oh, not those attitudes.  They do not make the world ‘richer.’” (though understanding the ideals of Islamic fundamentalism may very well make HSBC a more profitable bank).  I can quickly extend the list of parody:

Image: a performer in black face,
FUNNY / INSULTING / CLICHÉ

Image: an abortion in progress,
CHOICE / MURDER / MEDICINE

Image: the American flag,
FREEDOM / SATAN / TAXES

All ‘hot-button’ issues. Issues where tolerance of other viewpoints is not considered the ideal.

It is easy to discover the line.  These examples are obscene— inflammatory to all sides of common arguments… a refutation of multiculturalism.  And it is specifically the equivalency implied in the repetition of the image that insults.

This is the curse and boon of imagistic advertising: the emotional charge of the image cannot be separated from its message.  Images are highly associative, contagious, erotic in their juxtaposition.  The new HSBC campaign claims to “confront people with choices that will enable them to address their own values and discover what drives and motivates them in their daily lives”— a slightly insulting sentiment, that their ads perform some Rorschach test social function— if they do successfully diagnose us, to what purpose?  Is there a therapy session at the end of this test?  A gift store? But this is insincere ad-company boilerplate. HSBC does not want to enlighten New Yorkers; they want their business. The clear purpose is to create a brand identity that is targeted at an audience… global, multicultural, tolerant, flexible… But this multicultural brand is in danger of being subverted by the power of the image—overpowered by an emotional excessive denotation. Only the most cowed images can be controlled by these captions and wrangled into the desired meta-reading. Advertising—the dominant realm of text-image hybrids—is not an arena of ‘evocative’ imagery, but of ‘controlled’ imagery. In my photoshopped examples, high-minded concepts cannot be cordoned off from all the emotional charge of the specific image— a fact known by every advertiser seeking out emblems of banality in their stock photos: the smiling couple devoid of specific racial markers, the urban center devoid of either conspicuous wealth or poverty.  If HSBC uses an image of Hitler, regardless of their caption, the brand becomes Hitler.

This territory was explored in a more post-modern mode by Oliviero Toscani’s ad campaign for United Colors of Benneton in the 90’s where extremely charged images (a man dying of AIDS, a newborn baby, a water-fowl drowned in oil pollution) jumped from the pages with the irreconcilable caption, “United Colors of Benneton.” Between these campaigns we’ve experience a complete ideological shift, where Toscani’s ads seemed to deny the possibility of the caption and refute the banal stock-photo, the force of the caption, and the delimiting of a brand as meaning (instead pushing a sort-of brand as denotative excess). Instead, the Mindshare ads for HSBC trumpet the power of the textual caption to impose a subjective context, and that meta-reading becomes the brand-identity.

1989

1996

Image: Governor Mark Sanford,

ROMANTIC / LIAR / IDIOT

I could do these all day, like a contemporary parlor game. What is worthy of note in this process—and what is all too commonly forgotten in media analysis—is that imagistic thought is open, multivalent… and it is extremely so now.  This adopted role—the manipulator of the image, the artist, prankster, ad maker— is quite empowering.  I am in part laughing at myself, mining my own readings and associations for humor— but I am especially laughing at my audience who I imagine succumbing to their discomfiture at these juxtapositions of denotations. Another post-modern principle—one that is for me more comforting than the post-fascist multiculturalism expressed in the advertisements: composing these parodies, I rely on a similar evocative reading by the viewer— a certain empathy… a reliable quality in the expressiveness of the image. Isn’t this the basis of all art? Composing according to my own reactions, I hope to approximate the reaction of my creation by its future viewers.

And a final question: is it the force of the caption shifting the realm of the advertisement signification to a meta-level where I negotiate multiple subjectivities that best encapsulates the “figural,” or is it the excessive force of the image in my jests where I impose the power of the index into a discourse carefully avoiding it… “an Apollonian good form that the figural undermines as a Dionysian force or ‘energetics indifferent to the unity of the whole’” [13].

The problem with the remake is that the characters become static; their arcs already known, they exist in a state of fait accompli.  All the characters’ protestations, victories, tears seem little more than gross or comic gesture (certainly Spock comes across as a comedia dell’arte caricature, Zachary Quinto taking on the role of autodidactopath, the Harlequin of science fiction).  

It is like Peter Jackson’s King Kong.  The characters began the film in their post narrative state— the monkey already human, loveable, and redeemed, the Fay Ray characteer already in love with it, Nature in every aspect already dominant, mysterious, and over-powering the greedy machos.  In the first 15 minutes the film had already ended; the cast was left with two hours of comic gesticulations of performing-their-role through the film, like the amateur troupe performing in front of the screen at a Saturday night Rocky Horror Picture Show in the suburbs.  ”Twas beauty that killed the beast.”

Star Trek takes a more interesting approach—maybe because of Director J.J. Abrams’ tolerance of convolvement and f time-traveling fated narrative in Lost.   The story begins with the characters being detached from their prequel.  A time traveling villain (traveling back from a movie in the future… Star Trek 12 or such) has invaded this film to destabalize the prequel.  Kirk’s father died early and he is—in Anthony Lane’s words—a dickhead.  Spock seems to be completely un-Spock-like, always on the verge of tears, a constant source of irrationality on the bridge (running off to see his mama die, sending Kirk to his death, having sex in the elevator).  The most Spock-like character seems to be Uhura who, in traditional Hollywood style, has been de-masculated, de-racialized, and subordinated to a pretty face that says “Don’t go.”  The stakes are high.  The imaginary Producers must be sweating bullets— what if the Enterprise never reaches the future franchise?  Maybe all will not return to predictable equilibrium.  The fans will be furious.  …Who will come to save the film?

A visitor from the future franchise, of course.  If there is any human Star-Trek-constant beyond pseudoscience terms, special effects, and federation symbols it is Leonard Nemoy who arrives in the film as if stopping off on his way from ComicCon.  ”You must find the franchise,” he tells Kirk-head.  The characters must get in to role or the universe/film will fall apart.  By the end of the film, everyone takes their correct chair on the bridge, literally in last minutes.  ”Places everyone?  …Action!”

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.

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!

You might say the blog industry is taking over, but that’s hardly the case. We have famous blogs like Gawker, which makes its fame, at least originally by making fun of newspapers in New York. What are they going to make fun of when there is no real newspaper left? Then we have political blogs such as the Huffington Post, one of whose unpaid, voluntary reporter just killed her partner then committed suicide. But if you notice when there are tons of Page Six alike blogs, there is no Page 2 and Page 3 alikes, simply because no blogs can afford to send “bloggers” anywhere to actually report. Blogs do stew fries, but without original material I wonder how are they going to make food?

In other news of this week, what’s also potentially folding: the Men’s Vogue (change to a half-a-yearly…wait what?), Conde Nast’s Portfolio, Radar Magazine, although I hardly have any sympathy over the magazine industry. Also facing huge budget cut: the New York Times, and basically everything else. Somehow I feel bad that we live in this age that our hundred-year-old grandparents are finally dying.

wheat, when not moving, looks like dog hair.

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.

At home, circa 1968

A few interesting production choices: it’s clear that Barack has been living in an un-broadcast reality television fishbowl the past year… choice bits of footage from his meetings across the country are used in slow motion… the video moves to black and white photography for the end, trying to evoke a little of the new deal, combined with JFK and Time magazine… instant history you can vote for… black and white photo-stills remain the marker of History.

But these last images are striking… because of his race. What history could these be pictures from? They are such images of integration… there is nothing from photo documents of Reverend King that shows such simple integration (though the fashion has not changed a bit)… there is no sign of race division in these Black and White photographs. Instead, race has become a simple beneficial histogram of the photo, filling in the zones of contrast in the political system (Ansel Adams would jump on the mountain tops to see these political snapshots finally complete zones black to white!)
I am struck by them, despite myself. …I suppose it is History. And it still expresses well in black and white.

The logic of hypermediacy and the hypermediation of space are found in mapping practices and cinema art through the presence of multiplicity, the act of fragmentation, and a constant reference to the presence of a mediator. Simply compared, new forms of mapping and modern works of cinema art utilize objects of mediation to frame disparate datasets of symbols and signs from divergent spaces. In doing so, they elicit the mental formation of navigable space in the viewer/user—a hybrid space created somewhere in-between exterior points of reference and the self-center of the viewer. They mediate and organize divergent datasets to integrate them into a cohesive space of multiplicity—a mercurial location where connections and possibilities may emerge that could not otherwise do so in the ontological rigidity of a finite, determined, single space. Essentially, these practices communicate the presence of space through the aforementioned characteristics of fragmentation, multiplicity, and reference to the medium. In such a way, both contemporary cinematic art and emerging practices of mapping engage in the rupturing of homogenous space and the multiplication of heterogeneous environments, affecting a hypermediation of diverse spatiality that redefines what attributes demarcate a unified space.

Over the past fifteen years, cinema has become increasingly prominent as a material medium in the art world. As a material medium, cinema has been incorporated into art not simply by depicting moving images or through filmic allusions, but through the use of cinematic language and form as fundamental visual structures. By using cinematic language and form, modern art has also engaged cinematic space in various ways to expand the parameters of mediated territories and broaden the viewers’ experiences of on-screen environments. Contemporary cinema art blurs the lines between physical spaces, imaginary spaces, emotional spaces, and social spaces. This trend is exemplified in the cinematic works of Abbas Kiarostami, Yang Fudong, Tacita Dean, Anri Sala, Peter Tscherkassky, Matthew Barney, and Elija-Liisa Ahtila. In some manner, all of the cinematic works by these artists are marked by distinct and deliberate engagements with a self-conscious, mediated, hybridized, navigation of space.

As cinema art has expanded its engagement with space, a host of new mapping practices has arisen in response to virtual networks and on-line culture. The majority of these practices attempt to re-contextualize and explore the concept of what defines a “space.” Many of these practices are technology-driven and based in networks or systems of information (in mobile communication networks, satellite coordinate systems, and social networks) using digital media and communication-based platforms as a tool to navigate and address alternative perspectives on space. Projects exemplifying this trend are Waag Society’s Amsterdam Realtime; Scott Patterson, Marina Zurkow and Julian Bleecker’s PDPal; Proboscis’ Urban Tapestries; or Michelle Teran’s Life, A Users Manual. Many such projects have been implemented or integrated into the cultural sphere as public art projects or interactive public events that represent “alternate” cartographies and navigational tools. These emerging mapping practices, like contemporary cinema art, engage in a self-conscious process in order to integrate physical space with other spaces: networked spaces, communicative spaces, cultural spaces or political spaces.

Mapping with the cinematic medium uniquely addresses space through its dual existence as a process of mapping and a cohesive map object. It is inherently linked to the physical representation of space like no other form of visual communication. It communicates a corporeal experience of the primary senses, utilizes a pervasive and widely understood visual language, and subverts the distance of a zenith perspective. The unique mediating experience of a cinematic view is created by a tension of optical distance coupled with the intense proximity of a medium, unique in that it points toward the embodied possibilities that might emerge between corporeal and non-corporeal spaces. By articulating the possibilities, the extant plurality of a space, you create a larger space for possible existence; you draw out and articulate the inherent potential of an environment. In short, the more possibilities that exist for something, the more space is present. Since cinema is the basis for the modern cultural interface, an interface that mediates “complicated” space, it makes sense to utilize it for spatial engagement and mapping processes.

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.