School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications

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    Cybertime: ontologies of digital perception
    CUBITT, SEAN ( 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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    Digital landscape and nature-morte
    CUBITT, SEAN ( 2006)
    Susan Collins' Glenlandia (and its immediate predecessor Fenlandia) employs a webcam on location feeding a plasma screen with a resolution of 320 x 240. The pixels arrive at one per second. It takes 76,800 seconds to complete an image, 21.33 hours, just under a day. Chances are that there will be a dark area of night (though Collins reports instances of a smear of moon across a night-time sky) and inexplicable artefacts, pixels of intense and unexpected colours appearing day or night, perhaps starlight or some unwitting creature flitting across the field of view. Hovering between photograph and moving image, the slow accrual of image, the slow erasure of the previous picture, make this in some interesting ways exemplary of the capacities of digital media, in particular some aspects of referentiality, and most specifically, in the first instance, the question of the representation of time.