Thinking Through Digital Media

Transnational Environments and Locative Places

D. Hudson, P. Zimmermann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349492701, 9781137433619
• eBook ISBN: 9781137433633
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Thinking through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places speculates on animation, documentary, experimental, interactive, and narrative media that probe human-machine performances, virtual migrations, global warming, structural inequality, and critical cartographies across Brazil, Canada, China, India, USA, and elsewhere.

1

Taking Things Apart to Convene Micropublics

Thinking through digital media highlights collaborative and participatory aspects of media practice to convene critical micropublics, yet it also highlights the potential for control and surveillance. One of the primary objectives of the hacker ethos of “taking things apart” is to understand the invisible and inaudible aspects of digital media as well as the larger networks that shape social interactions and productions of knowledge along with state and corporate structures that seek to contain them. Hacking and pirating draw upon Marxist theories about the materiality of media as well as the political economies of its production, circulation, and meaning. Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer, for example, theorized photographic and cinematographic possibilities like the close-up and slow motion that could reveal what the human eye, trained by conventions of everyday life, overlooks. Benjamin hoped that “the work of art” would counter the rise of fascism; Kracauer believed film could bring about the “redemption of physical reality.”¹ Hacking and prirating offer comparable strategies to make visible—in this case, propiatary locks on creativy and innovation. Transnational corporations, such as Apple, market and promote a discourse of do-it-yourself (DIY) that suggests that anyone and everyone can control the means of both production and distribution. These economies of desire have changed little since the era of classical cinema when Benjamin and Kracauer wrote with the surplus meaning of fan magazines that promised to reveal secrets behind Hollywood’s invisible style. At the same time, these corporations enforce copyright in ways that can stifle creativity and innovation. Although maligned in commercial media, especially Hollywood films, hacking and pirating engage democratic potentials of digital media and networks.

Steven Levy defines a hacker ethic as (1) an unlimited and total access to computers with a imperative of “taking things apart, seeing how they work, and using this knowledge to create new and even more interesting things”; (2) a free exchange of information, particularly in the form of computer programs, for “overall greater creativity”; (3) a decentralized and open system that avoids bureaucracy since it “cannot accommodate the exploratory impulse of true hackers”; (4) an acceptance into a hacking community based on hacking rather than “superficial criteria” or “bogus criteria such as [academic] degrees, age, race, or position”; (5) a creation of things of art and beauty with the conviction that “the code of the program held a beauty of its own”; and (6) a belief that “computers can change your life for the better.”² Applied to digital media, a hacker ethic strives toward social good through critical thinking. It takes apart the invisible technologies and seamless networks of power. It pirates software and mods hardware. In the context of transnational environments and locative places, hacking and pirating suggest a radical interdisciplinarity. As we inherit global crises from the limitations of disciplinary and disciplined thinking, hacking and pirating offer the possibility of interdisciplinary solutions. In part, the solution lies in recognizing our complicity. Much like hackers engage in taking things like software apart, artists, coders, activists, students, and intellectuals engage in taking things like ideas apart in locative media, video mashups, and computer games that implicate audiences as participants.

The hacker ethic of exploration and free sharing emerged across the Internet in bulletin board systems (BBSs), news groups, listservs, forums, multi-user dungeon/dimension (MUDs), multi-user object oriented environment (MOOs), and other virtual communities. Despite setbacks of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998, the dot-com bust in 2001, and the War on Terror in 2003 in the United States alone, digital media adopted different permutations of these forms from e-mail projects and websites that utilized primarily hypertext to networked installations and streamed audio or video from webcams. With the accelerated development of new technologies and concurrent accelerated antiquation of these technologies, web-based art refashions itself as browser art, software art, spam art, click environments, code poetry, generative art, and art hactivism, intersecting with mashups, machinima, and clip and GIF culture. In particular, increased bandwidth and data compression (source encoding) capacities have permitted artists and users greater options. Newer applications like graphical user interface (GUI), vector-graphics programs such as Flash, high-resolution animation, plug-ins, algorithmic “smart automation,” and interactivity to websites offer a vast aesthetic improvement over hypertext and raster-graphics (bitmap) programs.

The digital media projects analyzed in this chapter—locative media, video mashups, computer games—take things apart. They hack and pirate. Neither do they merely take images apart to excavate obscured meaning nor intervene into discourse. Instead, they are public actions into and around constructions and artifice.³ In their practices, no object, machine, or concept is unified and unassailable. Artists, coders, intellectuals, students, and activists collaborate and implicate audiences. They unscrew backs of smartphones, modify chips and software, reroute and mashup apps, and interface with digital printers. These projects also migrate: they move relentlessly between analogue and digital, between the lived and the imagined. They migrate across and through different social spaces beyond theaters, and multiplexes, and the private spaces of television and game consoles. Also, they operate within and around micropublic zones such as kiosks, storefronts, community centers, galleries, festivals, fairs, clubs, and schools. These projects revise debates in animation, documentary, experimental, interactive, and narrative media concerning oppositional political practices.⁴ These projects function as utopian and aspirational sites rather than as discourses of sobriety, operating in the hypothetical realms of “what if” rather than the more empirical documentary realm of “it was.”⁵

As mashups and locative media combine with migratory archives, digital media projects open up zones for ongoing contestations and speculations about labor, the environment, and political histories. These projects move beyond images that attempt to fix meaning into much more fluid, mobile environments. Locative media practices, for example, use mobile digital technologies to map and interact with material spaces. They are iterative, mutating, provisional, and adaptive, functioning within quite a different mode than analogue media.⁶ Their structuring of interactions and convening of micropublics is more salient than how they create images. Locative media practices shift the terms of animation, documentary, experimental, interactive, and narrative media production. They move from images to interfaces, from refined arguments to contestations and speculations.⁷ Part of the new heterogeneous transnational media ecology, locative media expands on legacies of Fluxus and participatory art which foregrounded the assemblage of transitory publics.⁸ However, locative media extends these practices by probing the interstitial zones between invisible, ubiquitous technologies, imbedded networks of control, the materiality of digital machines, and the necessity of embodied interaction.⁹ Locative media counters the immateriality of virtualization and the privatization of miniaturized handheld technologies.

Mashups and locative media explore the production of social spaces beyond the image as a fixed text. They are not products or films, but nodal points for engagements, relationships, convivialities, conversations, mobilities, conjurings, and potentialities. They are unresolved, inconclusive, shape shifting, and adaptive. Some projects rework technologies that are widely available and controlled by corporations like GoogleMaps’s fly-through function; others operate outside the locked-down system of corporate control through BitTorrent. By appropriating technologies, artists and collaborative groups create tactical media that elicit reflection upon the images and interfaces of everyday consumption and technologies. These projects share common structural and operational characteristics of this newly emerging digital media ecology.¹⁰ They all foreground digitally networked technologies to remap temporal and spatial relationships. They mobilize experimentation as a critical engagement. They question location and mapping. They produce the archive and new conceptions of artifacts, rejecting the authority of previously established archives. They enact collaborative and participatory practices to generate micropublics, reconfiguring relationships between artists and audience.¹¹ They trouble the divide between analogue and digital, material and virtual. We do not suggest that these emerging animation, documentary, experimental, interactive, and narrative modalities replace their legacy analogue forms. Rather, we argue that they open up the legacy analogue modes to reappraisal and revision.

We offer examples that demonstrate some of the multitude of ways that digital media, particularly mashups and locative media, extends and challenges the politics of animation, documentary, experimental, interactive, and narrative media. Artists and collectives working with P2P file-sharing, mobile technologies, and migratory archives activate political engagements, microgeographies, and interventionist cartographies to probe the politics of terror and location of global sustainability.¹² Locative media and migratory archives conceive of their publics differently than analogue media. Rather than speaking about, to, with, or alongside their public, they deploy networked technologies to convene provisional and transitory micropublics. Their design imbeds collaborative processes. Some projects do not exist without enactment and engagement.

In live performances and real-time actions, locative media and migratory archives practices disturb, dislodge, and redesign digital technologies we use everyday, like bar codes on passports and chocolate bars, RFID tags used for antitheft devices in stores and for toll-collection on highways, GPS satellites and receivers, vector graphics in computer and video games, WLAN technologies, SMS communication, and cellular telephone networks. These various digital media practices reposition highly specialized technologies within the democratic discourse of amateurism, which refutes technology as inaccessible and too complicated. The emerging locative media and migratory archives movement has accelerated with legislations like the United States’ Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT) Act in 2001 and India’s Prevention of Terrorism Act (PoTA) in 2002, which authorize unprecedented data mining, invasions of privacy, wiretapping, and Internet surveillance. Mashups and locative media focus on enactments rather than representations, conjuring provisional micropublics in public spaces. They invent new kinds of performative systems that open up liminal zones between digital and analogue, virtual and material, embodied and disembodied, game and reality, body and interface, history and mapping. Thinking through digital media provokes debate about the functions and power of technologies.¹³ They take apart our assumptions and expectations.

Programming Video Mashups

Digital media is often interested in presenting—making anew through selection, recombination, and automation—more than it is interested in representing. It is simultaneously computational and representational. Computers “represent” in the playback based on various computations. In this sense, the video mashup might be called a quintessential digital form. Video mashups make apparent differences between analogue media’s faith in information in contrast to digital media’s manipulation of data. They remediate. They are disinterested in the direct (or indexical) relationships between mediation and the world in the pictorial (or iconic) possibilities through duplicating and manipulating information at the level of data. They take apart the binary structures of digital data and the ways that they operate and circulate. More than a structuring of visual meaning by disrupting conventions of linearity or causality, as in the work of the historical avant-garde or in Sergei Eisenstein’s analytical montage, digital video mashups can access the automation of programming that restructures meaning as modular and multilayered. Video mashups weave new meaning between data and metadata, evoking Manovich’s description of the computer as a combination of Joseph-Marie Jacquard’s loom (c. 1801) that wove complex patterns mechanically via punched cards and Konrad Zuse’s Z4 computer (c. 1945) that discarded iconic coding of cinema for the binary coding of numbers, as in Plankalkül (literally, “calculus plan”) language.¹⁴

Torry Mendoza’s Kemosabe version 1.0 (United States, 2007; http://vimeo.com/474215) politicizes video mashups. It situates black-and-white images of the Lone Ranger and Tonto from the long-running television series, The Lone Ranger (United States, 1949–1957; cr. George W. Trendle and Fran Striker), to unpack the racial logic of classical television and cinema in the United States. The clarity of race and the linearity of racial distinctions disintegrate, as once-offensive images are appropriated and prepared for cultural critique. The short video disrupts the colonial racial logic of the so-called American Frontier by recalibrating the relationship between Tonto and the Lone Ranger. Through syncopated beats of dialogue and music, Mendoza reworks an offensive stereotype of Native Americans whose history in US cultural production begins with the dime novels of Zane Grey and continues through radio shows, comic books, serial movies, television series, sports mascots, and the branding of consumer products like Land O Lakes butter and Jeep Cherokee SUVs. Here, the ambiguous meaning of “kemosabe,” Tonto’s name for the Lone Ranger, foregrounds the productive possibilities for repurposing the toxins of colonialism’s cultural artifacts.

The video begins with looped footage of Tonto (Jay Silverheels) who offers to help the Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore). Mendoza contrasts Tonto’s stilted English-as-a-Second-Language (“me help you fight outlaw”) with the Lone Ranger’s oddly delivered line (“I . . . am . . . a lone ranger”). He flashes the black-and-white narrative with a color bar, signaling that attention is required to align representation with reality. Frequently captured in a high-angle shot, Tonto explains his existence to serve the Lone Ranger. Like other allegedly sympathetic racial stereotypes for minoritized groups in the United States, such as African American Mammies, Tonto has no family of his own—no obligations to anyone, even himself, apart for supporting the white-male hero. As the Lone Ranger explains he has “a plan,” Mendoza interrupts him, the flashing black screens with words like “colonization,” “manifest destiny,” and “westward expansion,” “forces assimilation,” and “genocide.” The Lone Ranger’s plans are taken apart, hacked, pirated, and thus presented as menacing rather than heroic, as calculated rather than ordained. The video reassembles found footage, taking apart the normalized, treasured, and com...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Taking Things Apart to Convene Micropublics
• 2  Mapping Open Space to Visualize Other Knowledges
• 3  Documenting Databases and Mobilizing Cameras
• 4  Tactical Engagement through Gaming and Narrowcasting
• 5  Collaborative Remix Zones: Toward a Critical Cinephilia
• Notes
• Index