School of Culture and Communication - Research Publications
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ItemObservations on the history and uses of animation occasioned by the exhibition Eyes Lies and Illusions selected from works in the Werner Nekes Collection( 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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ItemRealising Middle-earth: production design and film technology(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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ItemCodecs and capability(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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ItemFor a history of black( 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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ItemProjection: Vanishing and Becoming(MIT Press, 2007)
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ItemLibrary(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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ItemTV news titles: picturing the planet( 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.
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ItemMedia Art Futures(Elsevier, 2007)
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ItemDemocratic materials( 2005)Set on ‘shuffle,’ my iPod plays ‘Se Acabo La Choricera’, a campesino song recorded in Havana around 1912, a period when field-hands were moving to the city in droves bringing with them the music that would, in a handful of years, become the roots of salsa. With a sudden jump, it is playing the Metaux section of Iannis Xenakis’ Pleiades, a piece for metal percussion that sounds like it has been beamed in from another age. Shuffle mode on the iPod suggests two orders of democracy: democracy of access, the achievement of the nineteenth century struggle for the public library, and the ideal of a democratised art, here underlined by the chance encounter with a composition which shares with Schonberg the idea that all notes are equal. In ‘Metaux’, the notes are subjected to a mathematical algorithm and entrusted with the task of producing massed overtones. The principle is extended, when the iPod shuffles its tracks, to a democracy between tracks and kinds of music - old hierarchies of genre dissolve and new dialogues between musics emerge. The material access to the contents of the world’s archives of recorded sound, like the formal aesthetic of equality, are the conditions for what Attali calls ‘composition,’ music “that creates its own code at the same time as the work” and which is “a herald of a new form of socialization.” New auditory forms like podcasting thus raise questions about the future, and insofar as the characteristics of composition are democratic, the specific question: what might democracy become in the twenty-first century? I raise the questions from the standpoint of a discipline that does not yet exist, the history and philosophy of media. The adumbrations we have of this emergent discipline – the Canadians Innis and McLuhan, Mumford and Giedion in the United States, the strangely significant import of the Latin American connection through the work of Régis Debray, Armand Mattelart and Vilém Flusser – suggest that it must combine the work of history and of critical theory with the work of aesthetic analyses of media texts and technologies. Believing that mediation is the material form of societies, cultures, economies and polities, the ambition of the history and philosophy of media is no less than that of sociology: to understand what it is to be human.
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ItemGenealogies of Digital Light, Centre for Contemporary Photography, Wednesday 29 November 2006( 2006)The light of the world, casting light on dark places, enlightenment (East and West), the light that goes out of the eyes of the dying: illumination is more than physics. It is a central human metaphor. Those metaphors in turn are not only remnants of ancient paganisms and old beliefs, though they are in that respect ways in which we recall our otherwise anonymous ancestors. They are also tools that shape our thinking, that structure some of the great accounts of light from Grosseteste's De Luce (in MacKenzie 1996) to Newton's Opticks (1952), Goethe's Farbenlehre (1967) to Einstein's General Theory of Relativity andPlanck's foundational observations on the principles of quantum dynamics. And of course light is central to the techniques, technologies and discourses of the visual arts, and among them not least of photography. Light is the raw material of photography, in a purer sense than is true of any of the earlier visual arts save perhaps stained glass.