Experimental Film and Photochemical Practices

Kim Knowles

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030443085
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030443092
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

opens up new theoretical perspectives on materialist film

discusses the potential for new kinds of tactile knowledge, privileging process as a form of physical and embodied encounter

uses specific examples of analogue and hybrid experimental works to unravel new aesthetic and philosophical perspectives

© The Author(s) 2020

K. KnowlesExperimental Film and Photochemical PracticesExperimental Film and Artists’ Moving Imagehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44309-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. The Matter of Media

Kim Knowles¹

(1)

Aberystwyth University, Aberystwyth, UK

Kim Knowles

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

Throughout the recent wave of books and articles on the current state of film in the digital era one finds more or less the same conclusion: film, or cinema, in its previous incarnation is no longer. The technological shifts that have been taking place since the 1990s have dislodged the ontological foundations of the medium as well as its spaces of reception.¹ As several writers have demonstrated, we now live in an era of digital ‘convergence’, where the moving image manifests in numerous forms and contexts, sliding across a multitude of platforms and implicating the spectator/consumer in new ways.² What was previously associated with the cinematic experience has exploded into a moving image environment that resists any unified definition and infiltrates almost every aspect of our lives, from small handheld devices to gigantic public screens. Accordingly, current scholarship sets out to navigate this heterogeneous terrain and to make sense of its multifaceted and dispersed nature, revisiting and revising established theories whilst developing new ones. For André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, ‘cinema is going through a major identity crisis’,³ whilst for Janine Marchessault and Susan Lord the scope is wider—‘digital technologies are transforming the semiotic fabric of contemporary visual cultures’, they state, appropriating Gene Youngblood’s concept of ‘expanded cinema’ to account for the new landscape of ‘immersive, interactive, and interconnected forms of culture’.⁴ Clearly, it is not just cinema that is questioned in the digital era, but the entire realm of human experience: artistic expression, forms of communication and modes of being. Disentangling one from the other is a challenging task, and their interrelatedness demands theoretical approaches capable of teasing out the complexities.

Until quite recently, discussions of technological transition were dominated by the problematic concept of ‘new media’, a term that, like a stone skimming across the surface of water, gained momentum with each successive scholarly text dedicated to it. In Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s introduction to the revised 2016 edition of New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, aptly titled ‘Somebody Said New Media’, several key issues are put into play. ‘To talk of new media in the early twenty-first century’, observes Chun, ‘seems odd: exhausted and exhausting.’⁵ Not least because, tied to corporate interests, the increasing rate of technological replacement means that nothing is ever new for very long. ‘To call something new’, Chun continues, ‘is to guarantee that it will one day be old; it is to place it within a cycle of obsolescence, in which it will inevitably disappoint and be replaced by something else that promises, once again, the new’.⁶ This intricate relationship between the old and the new is central to understanding what is at stake when we talk about ‘new media’ or ‘new technology’, and it has certainly been one of the focal points in criticisms of ‘newness’. From Charles Acland’s perspective:

An inappropriate amount of energy has gone into the study of new media, new genres, new communities, and new bodies, that is into the contemporary forms. Often, the methods of doing so have been at the expense of taking account of continuity, fixity and dialectical relations with existing practices, systems and artifacts.⁷

In the heady rush to embrace and theorise the ‘new’, we have neglected to consider the wider cultural, economic and ideological implications of the recent technological (r)evolution, including the ever-changing notion of the ‘old’ and its precarious position in art, culture and society.

The New and the Obsolete

New technologies, like all consumer commodities, are aggressively marketed on their ability to improve on an existing product in terms of cost, speed, efficiency or style, to such an extent that the old is invariably framed as ‘undesirable, dysfunctional and embarrassing, compared with what is new’.⁸ In order to lock the consumer into a perpetual cycle of consumption, a visible dichotomy must be established that elevates the status of the new whilst denigrating and devaluing the old. Obsolescence, a concept that gained currency in the post-Fordist era, is the linchpin of this dichotomy and the buzzword of contemporary accounts of technological ‘progress’. It is useful here to draw on Evan Watkins’s remarks on the fabrication and ideological implications of the concept of the outdated. In what is perhaps one of the most rigorous investigations into the subject, Watkins argues that ‘obsolescence is far from being a natural phenomenon—the invention of a new technology does not automatically render the old ones obsolete; rather, the concept of the “outmoded” or the “outdated” arises from very specific and targeted maneuvers by a consumer-led industry that functions in the interests of capitalism, itself “an economy of change”’.⁹ ‘Obsolescence’, he states, ‘must be produced in specific ways’.¹⁰ Or, as Michelle Henning outlines in her discussion of obsolescence in relation to photography, it ‘is an ideologically produced designation. To study the production of obsolescence necessarily means to attend to social and cultural processes, to the production of a “field of equivalence”’.¹¹ Here, Henning picks up on Watkins’s concept of equivalent use to demonstrate how technologies are developed and marketed in such a way that ‘one thing [is viewed] as replacing the other’.¹² The process by which digital image production renders obsolete old analogue systems, for example, depends heavily on a particular narrative that bypasses their material specificities in order to place emphasis on the same basic functions. Thus, digital photography essentially does the same as analogue photography, only better, cheaper, faster and, importantly, in ways that allow more control over the final image.

Indeed, in the analogue-to-digital paradigm, the tendency to reduce the intricate dialectics of media change to a historical-theoretical standpoint that reinforces the cultural dominance of the new is often couched in such narratives of continuity, which see new media as not simply replacing old practices but perfecting the means through which their creative potential may be realised. Slavoj Žižek refers to this discourse as ‘the historiography of a kind of futur antérieur [future perfect]’ that involves ‘the well-known phenomenon of the old artistic forms pushing against their own boundaries and using procedures which, at least from our retrospective view, seem to point towards a new technology’.¹³ This view to a large extent characterises early accounts of new media, particularly Lev Manovich’s now well-cited The Language of New Media, in which one finds the statement that ‘the computer fulfils the promise of the cinema as a visual Esperanto’.¹⁴ The narrative of equivalent use is problematic because it encourages the understanding of digital technology as simply a replacement for film, in much the same way that the desktop computer replaced the typewriter, CDs replaced vinyl and the e-book is gradually replacing printed material.¹⁵ Mark Hansen, for example, criticises Manovich’s ‘circular history’, which ‘effectively reimposes the linear, teleological, and techno-determinist model of (traditional) cinema history’.¹⁶ Hansen, along with other critics such as D. N. Rodowick, have pointed out that this approach, with its emphasis on ‘overdetermined similarities’, has largely prevented the digital from finding its own creative voice as a medium with distinct technical properties and possibilities.¹⁷ Recent media archaeological approaches have challenged dominant trajectories of technological progress, pointing out the discontinuities and circumstantial decisions that punctuate the history of the moving image and unearthing alternative material histories.¹⁸ Garnet Hertz and Jussi Parikka’s exploration of ‘zombie media’ as a form of critical art practice, for example, demonstrates how discarded technologies condemned to the rubbish heap enter new ecologies of repurposing and reinvention.¹⁹ In their refusal to disappear, these undead objects complicate and reimagine understandings of history, temporality, functionality and intended use, working against the grain of capitalist desire.

Florian Cramer’s notion of ‘post-digital’ aesthetics follows a similar line, arguing that creative forms of technological reuse and misuse are the primary means through which individuals are able to navigate an alternative agenda to that of ‘digital high-tech and high-fidelity cleanness’.²⁰ For Cramer, using old media is ‘no longer a sign of being old-fashioned. It is instead a deliberate choice of renouncing electronic technology, thereby calling into question the common assumption that computers […] represent obvious technological progress and therefore constitute a logical upgrade from any older media technology’.²¹ This is, of course, intricately tied to questions of nostalgia and retro-fetishism, both bourgeoning fields of scholarly enquiry in the digital era and inseparable from any discussion of media transition. Since the turn of the millennium, and particularly in the ten or so years since the publication of Acland’s Residual Media, a number of studies on cultures of retro, vintage and nostalgia have emerged, opening up differing perspectives on contemporary society’s fascination with the past in an era of rapid technological and stylistic change.²² Svetlana Boym’s work has been particularly influential in developing more nuanced understandings of how nostalgia operates not simply as a ‘yearning for yesterday’, but also as a productive means of negotiating the past.²³ Nostalgia, she argues, ‘is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well’.²⁴ Whilst restorative nostalgia is associated with a reconstruction of the past, reflective nostalgia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. The Matter of Media
• 2. Materials, Materiality, New Materialism
• 3. Process and Perception
• 4. From Film Labs to Film Farm: Alternative Communities and Eco-Sensibilities
• 5. Projecting Film, Expanding Cinema
• Back Matter