School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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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ItemSoftware industry, religious nationalism, and social movements in India: aspects of globalization?(Garamond Press, 2002)Most theories of globalization have as their point of reference experiences in the developed world, thereby confining the debates to time-space compression or distanciation for example, or to quarrels about whether the world is becoming homogenous or heterogeneous. Such theoretical efforts are indicative of both the reoccupations of metropolitan academia, and also the lack of a cohesive theoretical thrust from the leftist intellectuals which takes into account developments in contemporary forms of global capitalism. The sometimes contradictory ways in which the diverse effects globalization are experienced or utilized in different parts of the developed world have come to academic and theoretical attention only very recently. Considering that the majority of the established canon of literature on the subject has been written by academics in the West, this is perhaps not surprising. However as indicated in the assumption that globalization is merely an extension of Western norms of modernity to the developing world, the almost total absence of any attempt to tackle the longstanding relationship between the West and the rest is worth noting, as is the similar neglect of social movements in several parts of the contemporary world which question the values underpinning aspects of globalization, and by doing so challenge the legitimacy of Western dominance.
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ItemTime and knowledge in the information ecology( 2002)This article considers the affects of neoliberal globalisation and the information technology revolution upon the production and dissemination of knowledge within the university. More broadly, it argues that the nexus between globalisation and computerisation is creating an ‘information ecology’, a growing environment of interconnectivity that has speed and commercialism as its principal dynamics. The paper argues that such an environment is creating a new ‘knowledge epoch’, one that valorises, more than ever before, instrumentalised knowledge over critical forms, and is producing a society that is increasingly unable to think reflexively about the issues and challenges that confront an increasingly complex world.
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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.