School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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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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ItemTechnology( 2006)This essay traces the increased centrality of technology to social life across the period of modernity. It examines major shifts in thinking about technology which underpin the shift from industrial to post-industrial society, and the emergence of concepts such as ‘technoscience’ and ‘technoculture’. It argues that a critical analysis of technology must analyse the way that histories of technological progress have been implicated in colonial hierarchies privileging the West. In examining the extension of technology from machines that make things to ‘machines that think’, including biotechnology and computerized ‘artificial life’, something implied in every historical iteration of technology is laid bare: defining the technological activates the border between nature and culture, and goes to the heart of what it means to be human.
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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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ItemFrom code to the everyday( 2005)In this essay analysing four recent books, I trace the mutation of the concept of digital from the chilling prognosis of Baudrillard in the 1970s to the material diffusion of digital culture in the image worlds andeveryday life of early 21st century.
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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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ItemFrom glass architecture to big brother: scenes from a cultural history of transparency( 2003)The recent international popularity of the Big Brother television franchise has highlighted some of the ways in which concepts of public and private space are being transformed in contemporary culture. The fact that the primary scene of action in Big Brother is a hybrid television studio fashioned as a domestic dwelling - a 'home' in which people live which being watched by others - brings into focus many issues raised by the increeasing mediatisation of what was formerly private space. In this sense, Big Brother forms a lighting rod from the ambivalent hopes and ambient fears produced by social and technological changes which have given new impetus to the modernist dream of the transparent society. In this essay, I want to reposition the Big Brother phenomenon in the context of an ealier debate about domestic space which occurred during the emergence of architectural modernism in the first decades of the twentieth century. At issue then was the physical construction of the home, particularly through the increasing use of glass as a design element. While glass architecture is even more prevalent in the persent, its spatial impact - particularly in terms of its capacity to alter the relationship between the 'inside' and the 'outside' - has now been matched or exceeded in many respects by the effects of electronic media. By tracing the parelledl between the unsettling spatial effects produced by both glass consturction and the electronic screen, I will sketch a cultural logic linking the modernist project of architectural transparency to the contemporary repositioning of the home as an interactive media centre. This shift corresponds to the emergence of a social setting in which personal identity is subject to new exigencies. As electronic media have both extended and transformed the spatial effects of glass construction, they have produced significant pressures on both private space and public sphere. Heightened exposure of the personal and the private is creating unpredictable consequences, no least in the public domain.