School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Observations on the history and uses of animation occasioned by the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions selected from works in the Werner Nekes Collection
    CUBITT, SEAN ( 2008)
    The exhibition Eyes, Lies and Illusions held at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) in Melbourne and the Hayward gallery in London was a selection from the 20,000 optical toys, scientific instruments, antiquarian books and visual entertainments in the collection of Werner Nekes, the German experimental film maker. This essay begins with a consideration of the historical trajectory of belief in the afterlife in relation to ‘animation’, the imputation of a soul to anything that appeared to move itself. The second section suggests that animation techniques bear witness to the persistence of atavistic beliefs in modernity. The third addresses the proximity of technology and magic in animation, and proposes a more extended use of the term ‘animation’.
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    Realising Middle-earth: production design and film technology
    CUBITT, SEAN (Manchester University Press, 2008)
    Miniatures, bigatures, digital mattes, 3D animation, costume, set and prop design, forced perspective, location and studio shoots all contributed to the creation of Middle-earth. The panoply of visual effects LOTR uses to build Middle-earth’s image has become familiar, not just from the films but also from television specials, websites, DVD appendices and commentaries, and the remarkable travelling Exhibition. Armour, prosthetics, stunt and miniature doubles, animal wranglers, blue screen, and the Massive intelligent agents are part of our language now. Weta Workshop and Weta Digital, with their army of collaborators did more than visualise the most-read – and most-imagined – book of the twentieth century. They realised the script, made real the fictional world where the narrative would take place. The challenge of realisation is in some sense the challenge of cinema itself – the French even use the word réalisation to describe filmmaking. Realising Middle-earth is both a technical challenge and a special kind of problem in realism, the aesthetic field dealing with depictions of reality (as in documentary) and the illusion of reality (as in dramatic fiction). Most complicated of all is the realisation of a world whose highest technology, the explosive device in the culvert of the Deeping Wall, is portrayed as the work of Saruman’s dark arts. Tolkien’s hatred of industrialisation comes through in the firepits of Isengard. Yet the films depend on the use of and innovation in new media technologies, and much of our viewing pleasure comes from appreciating the craft that has gone into them. We watch entranced by a double magic: the fascination of illusion, and the fascination of how it has been achieved.
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    Codecs and capability
    CUBITT, SEAN (Institute of Network Cultures, 2008)
    What makes a YouTube video good? Maybe it is the political tenor, or perhaps you like the ethics. Perhaps it looks nice. Or it’s funny. Perhaps a YouTube video is good when it reaches a lot of people. But the great thing about the internet is that it allows every minor interest, every academic specialism, every rare and refined hobby a place, so the numbers really don’t matter in the same way as the old media. Everyone has had that lovely serendipitous moment when you find exactly the right piece of data, exactly the right image, on the site dedicated to collecting photos of old street lights or the history of dye-transfer techniques. Popularity isn’t in question. Looking nice, being funny, politics, even ethics are pretty much personal opinion in the globally connected, rapid and fragmentary culture of the internet post-2002. It may be better to ask what makes a YouTube video bad. Then we have some answers. Slow download. Too much fuzz in the image or the soundtrack. Stutter. Technical qualities are what make a bad video. Things that go wrong, like using a pine green title on a black background. There is always a workaround, an optimal way of using the tool that’s available, but the tool has to be available, and a network tool has to be as nearly universally available as it can if it is to permit the serendipitous discovery of the lone like soul to yours among the billion pages.
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    For a history of black
    CUBITT, SEAN ( 2008)
    In 'For a History of Black' Sean Cubitt investigates the physiological, technological and cultural problems associated with the (non-) colour black. As the complete absence of colour, black is an ideal that is never actualised, says Cubitt. The representation of black operates differently in different media. In many contexts, such as low-light cinema, early television and new media art, artists have made creative use of the limitations and artefacts of how production technologies handle black. Cubitt's detailed media history connects questions of aesthetics with the physiology of perception and industrial changes.
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    Spreadsheets, sitemaps and search engines: why narrative is marginal to multimedia and networked communication, and why marginality is more vital than universality
    CUBITT, SEAN (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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    The distinctiveness of digital criticism
    CUBITT, SEAN ( 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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    Projection: Vanishing and Becoming
    CUBITT, S ; Grau, O (MIT Press, 2007)
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    Library
    CUBITT, SEAN (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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    Digital filming and special effects
    CUBITT, SEAN (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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    TV news titles: picturing the planet
    CUBITT, SEAN ( 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.