[-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 107, Issue 10

Mon Oct 14 19:26:22 EST 2013

Terry is taking us in a new direction, but important. As someone who has perpetrated both 'new media' and film scholarship, i feel the pain. One thing that distinguishes media and communications from the older humanities is that we have new texts every night, significant new media of production and distribution every eight months or so, and a really major new medium like net, games and mobile about every ten or twelve years.

Our responses as a community have been eclectic: media archaeology and media art history, software and hardware studies, studies of semio/cognitive capital and labour, post/decolonial, environmental and affect studies. . .

We have pillaged a number of pre-digital authors, notably Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault, and continue to raid Benjamin, Bergson, Heidegger, James . . . with revivals of half-hidden figures like Flusser and Simondon. We do need to read more of our own contemporaries, and to be bolder in our own thinking to do justice to the present and the emerging future(s). A huge amount of new thinking emerges from Indignados/Occupy, from the Mediterranean, from indigenous movements around the world, very alert to the net condition, and to the automation of markets and othe large and small scale trends

Many note that what was once radical is now established: I think it was critical art ensemble who first saw that contemporary corporations of the 1990s were rhizomatic and nomadic; and capital has become increasing 'espace lisse'.

Terry's work is fundamentally aesthetic: concerned with the senses, and with the articulation of the senses with technologies and with social and cultural forms. I'm more political but the same issues arise, alongside the big themes of globalisation, coloniality, ecology - the planetary scale - and some more local themes such as the nature of the crowd in the increasingly commercial public spaces of city centres (different in Tahrir and Times Squares) - a lever for looking at what interests Terry too, the new conditions of relationships between people.

spectacle and politics have been intertwined at least since Benjamin wrote about the aestheticisation of politics and the politicisation of aesthetics. The conditions of both have changed. We would have to look not only at the spectacle of revolt (the radical uses of spectacle) but at the spectacle of consensus in the EU , North America, China, Japan - and Korea???

We would have to ask when to distinguish the baroque shock-and-awe from the mobilisation of mass demands. These are both political and aesthetic questions (call them ethical if its easier, but ethics is about individuals, politics about "us")

To make these kinds of distinctions we need history, including the history of ideas about media. We also need to remake them for our moment

sean

On 13 Oct 2013, at 09:22, Terry Flaxton wrote:

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Tim and Richard, with respect, regarding your current discussion, I think it turns on an axis that we should reveal: the dilemma of whether to use new media or film theory as a way to understand what is happening globally. Both these forms arose in a prior age. We need to reframe, reboot, rekindle this discussion and move away from prior narratives.

There is no expanded cinema, no expanded video, nothing enlarged because the circumference of the bubble of definition of either has been surpassed and the surface tension of the meniscus of either cannot withstand the internal pressures of either. These are what they were, cinema, video. What is happening both in Busan and elsewhere far surpasses their categorys of definition.

I believe we are seeing a paradigm shift of identity of the way we who look and what we look at, are defining each other. Within the dark of cinema, or the projected electronic display light of a screen, light bounced or sent directly from the device that strikes us, this is an interplay of consciousness, the boundaries of which is the very thing that has already changed. We who look are changing in response to our own intervention on both the real and the virtual - the academic project to make the ungraspable as immaterial has failed, thankfully. The terms conditions and affordances of exchange are also transforming and where we as identities and in fact entities project our investments - or even that the interdependencies of the other and we ourselves are being redefined.

Now that might be frustrating to have to deal with as a set of ideas, but the imperative is that we do just so.

WIth what's coming next in the discussion, issues like national conditions of use of prior forms like time-based evocations of movement by images, such as 'spectacle' in relation to 'the political', any two functions are problematic as a dialectic because, it seems to me, that a position based upon juxtaposition is becoming redundant, that when last centuries theories of quantum reality were announced as descriptions of the material, we opened the box and from then on, discussing this, in relation to that, lost its power. The multitudinous complexity that is before us, is a reflection of what we actually now give ourselves permission to be. We are complex beings and our world is complex too. Complex, not in the sense of being 'difficult', but of being intellectually enriched to a degree of magnitude not witnessed before. I find that really exciting. Good luck with where this goes next.

Terry

Terry Flaxton
Professor of Cinematography and Lens Based Media
University of West of England
http://www.visualfields.co.uk/flaxtonpage1.htm
http://westengland.academia.edu/TerryFlaxton

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." Dwight D. Eisenhower

On 13 Oct 2013, at 08:52, Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu<mailto:tcm1 at cornell.edu>> wrote:

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Hi, Richard,

No I don't mean to suggest that creative 'convergence' is not possible with screen-based, linear films.  I too can think of many such examples, from early examples such as Chris Marker's Level 5 and Peter Greenaway's Prospero's Books to much more recent and more complicated examples, such as Bong's Snowpiercer. My concern is that the Busan film festival seemed hesitant to embrace and celebrate alternative approaches. I can see your concern about the "spectacular."  I'd be hesitant to argue against the value of the spectacular but I guess I could be baited into arguing for the value of lending adding attention to new media based approaches.  While I realize that this is my personal preference, it wouldn't be difficult to call upon the history of cinema to develop a suspicious attitude toward the merely spectacular.

Renate and I were meeting today with Alex Taek-Gwang Lee who will be our guest this week who made the very interesting suggestion that the convention of contemporary Korean film is not to divorce spectacle from the political.  So it will be interesting to hear more about this from Alex this week.

Best,

Tim

Director, Society for the Humanities
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York. 14853
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>] on behalf of Richard Wright [futurenatural at blueyonder.co.uk<mailto:futurenatural at blueyonder.co.uk>]
Sent: Saturday, October 12, 2013 7:38 PM
To: empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 107, Issue 10

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Dear Tim,

thanks for your response. I hope you won't mind if I say that I am still not quite sure I have got my head around this.

You referred to festival films that have brought the "spectacle of digital technologies" to the screen ("spectacle" being one of those words often used in these scholarly debates to connote something disapproved of). And contrast these to "alternative artistic approaches" that are specifically dependent on completely different basic moving image technologies (the interactive, networked, mobile and so on). So do you mean that the "converging", one directionally or otherwise, of digital technologies in screen based film (is that the right term? Or "linear film"? Or "theatrical film"?) does not lead to new artistic approaches but to the "spectacular"? And/or do you mean that even if they do lead to new artistic approaches they will not be as successful as those using new media based film technologies (is that the right term?) because these specific technologies are necessary to permit artistic approaches that can "critique commercial and conventional notions of the screen and vi
ewing subjects"?

I am not sure, but I think I might just be able to think of a few examples of single screen-based, linear, sit-on-your-arse-and-watch films, that qualify as incorporating new media forms into "alternative artistic approaches" and so able to "critique commercial and conventional notions of the screen and viewing subjects" or something equally worthy.

I do hope this is not all getting too convoluted,

Richard

Message: 4
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 23:55:27 +0000
From: Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu<mailto:tcm1 at cornell.edu>>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 107, Issue 9
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Dear Richard,

Thanks for your question and I'm happy to clarify my suggestion.  Yes, you're absolutely correct in suggesting that the presence and flavor of animation in Snowpiercer and Anatomy of a Paper Clip indicates the extent to which cinema has integrated digital technologies, I was trying to share my observation that this interest, at least as championed by the Busan International Film Festival, seemed to be one-directional.   While the festival championed these films that brought the spectacle of digital technologies to the big screen, it chose not to champion alternative artistic approaches to capitalizing artistically from multiple digital platforms, such as interactive technologies, multiple screen formats and mobile technologies,, networked cinemas or what Jeffrey Shaw has termed, iCinema, net.art, etc.  While this is understandable for a traditional film festival, the independent experimentation with new media that often critiques commercialism and conventional notions of th
e "screen" and viewing subject(s) seemed not receive any attention at this year's Busan Festival, which paradoxically staged a new conference format around the theme of medial "convergence." Hope this clarifies things.  Best,

Tim

Director, Society for the Humanities
Curator, Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Professor of Comparative Literature and English
A. D. White House
Cornell University
Ithaca, New York. 14853
________________________________________
From: empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> [empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre-bounces at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>] on behalf of Richard Wright [futurenatural at blueyonder.co.uk<mailto:futurenatural at blueyonder.co.uk>]
Sent: Friday, October 11, 2013 5:46 AM
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Subject: Re: [-empyre-] empyre Digest, Vol 107, Issue 9

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
Yello all,

not quite sure I follow the point you're (both) making about the "absence of new media and technologies influences" in the movies.

Aren't the two movies Tim Murray describes examples of just that?
The first "Snowpiercer" is described as using copious amounts of computer animation technologies. And the second "Anatomy of a Paper Clip" is described as using a (digital?) stop motion style of performance which would indicate the strong influence of technologies on artistic style.

So are they absent or not absent? Are you saying that these movies are rare exceptions? (which would not have struck me as the case).

Richard Wright

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Message: 1
Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 14:44:22 +0000
From: Timothy Conway Murray <tcm1 at cornell.edu<mailto:tcm1 at cornell.edu>>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
Subject: [-empyre-] Youngmin and things at BIFF
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?

Yet, Renate and I have enjoyed two films that seem to thrive on such convergences.  The Korean director Bong Joon-ho screened his extraordinary film, Snowpiercer, which tells an eerie and violent tale of social upheaval in the new postglobal warming ice age, as the survivors circle the globe in a hierarchically ordered train, with a marvelous performance by Tilda Swinton.  The marvel is how the film successfully cut between dazzling animated sequences of the train crashing through icebergs and the traditional analogue representation of the diegesis. We enjoyed the flipside of this tonight while watching Japanese director Akira Ikeda's Anatomy of a Paper Clip (a miminalist sado-masochistic portrayal of class abjection in which directing evoked a combination of realist miminalism and pared down animation).  While the film contained no animation until the credits, the actors every movements seemed to embody the craft of top-motion animation as nuanced in the digital scene.

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Date: Thu, 10 Oct 2013 11:21:43 -0400
From: Renate Ferro <rtf9 at cornell.edu<mailto:rtf9 at cornell.edu>>
To: soft_skinned_space <empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au<mailto:empyre at lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au>>
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Youngmin and things at BIFF
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Thanks Tim for encapsulating Youngmin's session.

One of the themes of the Busan Film Festival Forum has been the convergence
of contemporary cross-disciplinary interests with time-based media and
film. I concur with Tim that the striking absence of new media and
technologies influences is definitely noteworthy.

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