School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemImpact aesthetics: Back to the future in digital cinema? Millennial fantasies(SAGE Publications, 2000-12-01)This article engages recent debates about the future of cinema in the digital age. Firstly, it seeks to broaden the rather narrow terms in which the transition to digital cinema is often understood in film theory. Secondly, it tries to assess claims about the 'demise of narrative' frequently associated with the digital threshold. On one level, it is argued that a dialectical understanding of the relation between terms such as 'narrative' and 'spectacle' is needed to advance current debates. On another level, it is suggested that digital technology should not be wholly defined by the current dominance of 'blockbuster' films. In place of technological determinism, an understanding based on the politics of spectacle and distracted spectatorship is advanced.
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ItemTelevision: presenting the memory machine( 1987)This essay situates developments in contemporary television in relation to the dominant social relations of time. It argues that time is a perpetual ‘problem’ for television, extending beyond the terms of configuring narrative formats and strategies of visual reflexivity, and instead indicating deeper epistemological and existential issues. While contemporary television programming often seems driven by a desire to give viewers the immediacy of a perpetual ‘now’, this creates a series of increasingly intense contradictions concerning the social experience of time and the functioning of memory.
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ItemBut, Who, Derrida?( 1990)This essay investigates the politics of reading and interpretation using the critical framework articulated by Jacques Derrida. It argues against hasty dismissal of Derrida’s work by those who claim to be supporting ‘face-to-face social relations'. Instead, it suggests that a critical understanding of contemporary culture, characterized by the heightened importance of media technologies, should begin from Derrida’s critique of the philosophy of presence, including the social relations of time in which it is implicated.
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ItemDigital dialectics: the paradox of cinema in a studio without walls( 1999)This essay presents a brief history of the impact of digital technology on cinema. Drawing on original interviews with leading Australian film makers, it firstly examines how changes in technology are affecting contemporary film production. It then extends this analysis to consider the implications of such changes for contemporary film theory.
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ItemThe uncanny home: television, transparency and overexposure( 1997)I recently read a description of the house which is currently being built for Microsoft cyber-baron Bill Gates. Gates conceived his new residence as a state of the art merging of computer technology with architecture. At an estimated cost of $50 million, the house will naturally boast all the standard automated functions such as climate control and electronic security systems, as well as a few extras like a hot tub which switches itself on as soon as the master's car enters the grounds.
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Item'The go-for-broke game of history': the camera, the community and the scene of politics( 1994)Contemporary transformations in communication technologies – such as the digitalization of traditional photography, the proliferation of new delivery systems for television, the merging of camera, computer and television systems in fully ‘interactive’ media, Virtual Reality – have generated considerable debate. The fact that these debates now extend across was are often isolated discourses, linking technical manuals to corporate agendas and government policies, while granting cultural theory its place in the sun of the popular media, registers the extent to which these shifts are perceived to intervene at the fundamental levels of social life.
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ItemImpact aesthetics: Back to the future in digital cinema?( 2000)This article engages recent debates about the future of cinema in the digital age. It seeks to broaden the rather narrow terms in which the transition to digital cinema is often understood in film theory. It also tries to assess claims about the 'demise of narrative' that are frequently associated with the digital threshold. I argue that a more dialectical understanding of the relation between terms such as 'narrative' and 'spectacle' is needed to advance current debates. In place of the technological determinism which aligns digital technology with 'blockbuster'films, an understanding based on the politics of spectacle and the ambivalence of distracted spectatorship is advanced.
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ItemDream cities: the uncanny powers of electric light( 2004)In his famous 1919 essay, Freud (1955: 219-252) defines the uncanny to include experiences in which inanimate objects seem to come to life. In early modernity, this sense of the uncanny accompanied the spread of electric light, itself a manifestation of the near-miraculous powers of electricity. From the moment of its initial recognition as an independent phenomenon, electricity has been a source of profound wonder. Romantics rapidly identified it with a universal life force, dramatised in the archetypal modern creation scene of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel and distilled by Goethe into ‘the soul of the world’. A century later, the prospect of widespread electrification literally dazzled the world, inspiring entrepreneurs, artists and revolutionaries alike with visions of an irresistible electrical future. At the same time, electricity has always led a double life. Beneath the Promethean narrative of limitless possibilities lies a more utilitarian tale of practical development. Counterpointing the arcane myth of electricity’s magical properties — force without muscle or steam, light without flame — is the profane physical reality of its often cumbersome technical infrastructure. Supporting the spark of the incandescent lamp which shines brighter than any jewel are unsightly poles and criss-crossing wires, not to mention ferocious patent wars and internecine struggles to form some of industrial capitalism’s most powerful corporations.
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ItemThe public and the private: John Berger's writing on photography and memory(ANU Canberra School of Art Gallery, 2000)John Berger's writings on photography belong mostly to the 1970s. Like Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes, Berger is an advocate of realism, although in neither a naive nor a simplistic fashion. I argue that Berger's writing on photography stands out firstly because of its refusal of a blanket response. Instead, the pivot of his analysis is ambiguity: on one level, the ambiguity of photographic meaning, but also the ambiguity of photographic practice due to the social and political contradictions in which the camera is embedded. This refusal to homogenise the entire field is important, because it allowed Berger to remain attentive, at a moment when many were not, to the different registers of photographic usage.
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ItemWalls of light: immaterial architectures(Centre for Contemporary Photography, 2002)Alex Proyas’ film Dark City (1997) begins when a man wakes up to find he is sharing a room with a woman who has been brutally murdered. His memory is hazy, fragmented. He can’t remember what happened. He can’t remember his own name. The film conjures a compendium of noir elements: seedy hotels, shadowy streets, a string of dead women, hard-boiled cops, a hero accused of murder, a torch singer heroine, all set in what seems to be the noir heyday of the 1940s. The plot, as with so many noir tales, revolves around a search for memory and identity. Underneath the surface of everyday life lurks a massive conspiracy. Someone - a group of strangers - is after him. They want to kill him, but no one believes it. His quest for personal identity becomes a journey into the underbelly of the city, an exposure of its double life. Dark City keeps faith with the noir tradition in which urban alienation is cloaked with sexual overtones and redemption from the night-world is the task of an individual man. The most interesting aspect of the film is the way its striking visual design marries the possibilities of digital imaging in cinema to an urban fable in which brute materialism is explored as a narrative conceit. The city is explicitly figured as a pseudo-sociological experiment run by aliens, and a science fiction story is augmented by science fiction modes of perception - photo-realistic images which warp and morph before our eyes in “real time”. Liquid architecture is born.