School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemSpreadsheets, sitemaps and search engines: why narrative is marginal to multimedia and networked communication, and why marginality is more vital than universality(British Film Institute, 2002)Media Studies both benefits from and is overdetermined by its double origin, among sociologists increasingly convinced of the centrality of communication to modernity, and among literary schools diminishingly persuaded of the relevance of past literatures to the lived experience and likely futures of their students and themselves. The clash of cultures has been immensely fruitful. But the dialectic of humanities and social science approaches has occasionally broken down: one critical example is the failure of ‘ethnographic’ audience studies top square off with qualitative and statistically based analysis of audiences, leaving a yawning gap between micro-studies of ‘real people’ and macro-studies of whole populations. Studies of the new media are beginning to bridge the gap through the wide-scale interactive dialogues that have begun to break down the impasse. A second unfortunate effect has been the felt necessity to preface any methodological proposal with a diatribe against whatever the author perceives as the previous dominant discourse in the discipline.
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ItemThe distinctiveness of digital criticism( 2000)The core concern of media studies today is the material form of mediation. In whichever direction we take our analyses, the specificity of the discipline lies in its attention to the detailed functioning of textuality. The sociology of communication, the political economy of the media, the philosophy of media aesthetics are distinctive subdisciplines of other, older, fields of research. What distinguishes ours is the irreducible materiality of mediation. We can perhaps feel that we are less prone to overgeneralisation, mythmaking and simple errors of fact because of that attention; and that we are in a better position to make statements about audiences, institutions, economies, societies, cultures and aesthetics because we have spent long years, both individually and as a research community, looking at the minutiae of historical and contemporary media. And yet we seem to have betrayed the digital media not only in the failure to archive electronic media but intellectually too: in the half-acceptance of a view that the digital media in some way effective dematerialisethe older media. Once dematerialised, media can no longer fall into our field or, alternatively, we are confronted with the proposal that we abandon the central object of our studies, the materiality of the text, and remake ourselves in the theoreticis mould with which the US academy in particular greeted the embarrassingly political discourses of 1970s 'Screen Theory'. As literary theory has pursued the dematerialisation of the book, print, paper and inks in the abstraction of the text, so media studies faces a choice between dematerialising and rematerialising its object.
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ItemProjection: Vanishing and Becoming(MIT Press, 2007)
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ItemLibrary(Sage, 2006)The modern library derives from a vision of public service developed in the 19th century. At various times in the past a commercial service, an educational resource, a religious domain and a political institution, the library today exists in various forms, including all these but in addition the professional libraries held by law firms and scientific or technological associations, multimedia lending libraries and certain areas of the world-wide web.
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ItemDigital filming and special effects(British Film Institute, 2002)It is curious that digital photography should have spawned a respectable critical literature, while digital cinematography has, as yet, generated very little theoretical work that deals specifically with film. Two possible reasons come to mind. First, digital cinema approaches more closely the culture of animation than lens-based cinematography. And second, the darkroom has always been a key factor in photographic practice, whereas in cinema, postproduction has traditionally been understood as the editing process, rather than the developing and printing of the film strip. I raise this curiosity, which in all likelihood will be a brief and passing phase, only because it raises another conundrum. Traditionally, studies of cinema history have always devoted a chapter to pre-cinematic devices (phenakistoscopes,thaumatropes and so on) and especially to the chronophotography of Eadweard Muybridge, Etienne-Jules Marey and their contemporaries (the most influential, although now controversial, account is Ceram, 1965). Like other contemporary scholars, I rather distrust this continuity model of cinematic development. The quickest way to describe the difference between chronophotography and cinematography is to point out that the unit ofchronophotography is the still frame, but that of cinema is three frames: the one just past, the current one and the one coming up. Crudely put, chronophotography was an analytical medium: cinema is synthetic. This is why chronophotography rather than cinema became the tool of choice for Taylorism and ‘scientific management’.
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ItemTV news titles: picturing the planet( 2006)The structures of globalization are insanely complex. The world's news media must at least try to make some sense of these structures visible. That is, the news must gratify the needs of an audience which requires an understanding of what causal systems are responsible for such felt effects as oil prices, currency fluctuations, and the migration of employment. Media professionals' ethics, peer pressure and pride in their craft impel them to make some effort towards educating the citizenry in the terms and conditions of participation in the global economy. And, in light of popular movements like the Live8 concerts in support of Bob Geldoff's "Make Poverty History" campaign, the news touches on the possibilities and challenges of global governance.
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ItemMedia Art Futures(Elsevier, 2007)
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ItemDemocratic materials( 2005)Set on ‘shuffle,’ my iPod plays ‘Se Acabo La Choricera’, a campesino song recorded in Havana around 1912, a period when field-hands were moving to the city in droves bringing with them the music that would, in a handful of years, become the roots of salsa. With a sudden jump, it is playing the Metaux section of Iannis Xenakis’ Pleiades, a piece for metal percussion that sounds like it has been beamed in from another age. Shuffle mode on the iPod suggests two orders of democracy: democracy of access, the achievement of the nineteenth century struggle for the public library, and the ideal of a democratised art, here underlined by the chance encounter with a composition which shares with Schonberg the idea that all notes are equal. In ‘Metaux’, the notes are subjected to a mathematical algorithm and entrusted with the task of producing massed overtones. The principle is extended, when the iPod shuffles its tracks, to a democracy between tracks and kinds of music - old hierarchies of genre dissolve and new dialogues between musics emerge. The material access to the contents of the world’s archives of recorded sound, like the formal aesthetic of equality, are the conditions for what Attali calls ‘composition,’ music “that creates its own code at the same time as the work” and which is “a herald of a new form of socialization.” New auditory forms like podcasting thus raise questions about the future, and insofar as the characteristics of composition are democratic, the specific question: what might democracy become in the twenty-first century? I raise the questions from the standpoint of a discipline that does not yet exist, the history and philosophy of media. The adumbrations we have of this emergent discipline – the Canadians Innis and McLuhan, Mumford and Giedion in the United States, the strangely significant import of the Latin American connection through the work of Régis Debray, Armand Mattelart and Vilém Flusser – suggest that it must combine the work of history and of critical theory with the work of aesthetic analyses of media texts and technologies. Believing that mediation is the material form of societies, cultures, economies and polities, the ambition of the history and philosophy of media is no less than that of sociology: to understand what it is to be human.
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ItemCybertime: ontologies of digital perception( 2000)Although much work in digital cultures alights on the concept of space as a medium for orientation in narrative productions, the structuring of time is now an urgent object of study for cybercrtitics, as indeed it has been for philosophers and social scientists (Virilio, Lash, Osborne inter alia) in recent years. The problems confronted include those of the divorce between space and time as a prioris of Kantian and subsequent philosophies, the nature of time as datum, and the social theorisation of time as construct. The paper will argue that temporality has become a raw material for digital production, as much as luminance or narrativity, and that the malleability of time has produced both new closures and new openings for creative work in new media.
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ItemGenealogies of Digital Light, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Wednesday 29 November 2006( 2006)The light of the world, casting light on dark places, enlightenment (East and West), the light that goes out of the eyes of the dying: illumination is more than physics. It is a central human metaphor. Those metaphors in turn are not only remnants of ancient paganisms and old beliefs, though they are in that respect ways in which we recall our otherwise anonymous ancestors. They are also tools that shape our thinking, that structure some of the great accounts of light from Grosseteste's De Luce (in MacKenzie 1996) to Newton's Opticks (1952), Goethe's Farbenlehre (1967) to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity andPlanck's foundational observations on the principles of quantum dynamics. And of course light is central to the techniques, technologies and discourses of the visual arts, and among them not least of photography. Light is the raw material of photography, in a purer sense than is true of any of the earlier visual arts save perhaps stained glass.