Norman McLaren

The Scottish born, Canadian filmmaker and animator Norman McLaren (1914-1987) discovered cinema at the Glasgow School of Art. Initially he was influenced by Eisenstein. At some point he was introduced to the work of Osker Fishinger who produced abstract animations and the work of Claire Parker and Alexander Alexeieff and Émile Cohl. Parker, Alexeieff and Cohl used an animation technique called metamorphosis. I am not quite describing the technique correctly. I will have to consult Paul Well’s book Understanding Animation. This technique was developed further and employed by McLaren in a number of his experimental animations.

I particularly interested in its application within the mode of representation of surrealism. A great deal of McLaren’s work was informed by surrealist techniques.





Above are two stills from A phantasy on a nineteenth century painting (1946) which was inspired by the painting series Isle of the Dead (1880- 86) by Arnold Böcklin

Digital Culture 4: Control Society

Cloud Culture: http://www.counterpoint-online.org/cloud-culture-a-new-counterpoint-publication-and-ica-debate/



Deleuze, Postscript on the Societies of Control: http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=GIus7lm_ZK0

The ‘Architecture’ of the Web: Digital Utopias and Dystopias

"It’s a strange day
No colours or shapes
No sound in my head
I forget who I am
When I’m with you
There’s no reason
There’s no sense
I’m not supposed to feel
I forget who I am
I forget
Fascist baby
Utopia, utopia
My dog needs new ears
Make his eyes see forever
Make him live like me
Again and again
I’m wired to the world
That’s how I know everything
I’m super brain
That’s how they made me"

Utopia by Goldfrapp.


Ideas pertaining to the ‘modern movement’ in architecture can be used to inform many of the debates and ideas that now surround the World Wide Web, Web 2.0 and indeed Media Studies 2.0.

"1984" Apple Macintosh Advertisement directed by Ridley Scott

There is a sense of post-modern euphoria that we have broken free from the past and that old modernist theories are as redundant as their hierarchies of class, culture and taste, to name but three; we have reached some kind of e-topia. These utopian concepts partly came out of the sixties counter culture that reacted against modernism’s perceived authoritarianism- one thinks of Apple, a product of Californian sunshine and LSD, offering us an alternative world, a technological vision with a Byrdsian soundtrack, an alternative to the grey corporatism of the monolithic and historically dubious IBM. In eschewing modernist theories along with all the modernist inequities, are we in danger of throwing the theoretical baby out with the modernist bathwater?

In fact, the optimism surrounding the Internet and the World Wide Web as a communications tool has modernist utopian overtones, because modernism itself was, to many modernists, also a utopia. The web can be seen as a social condenser. The social condenser is a Soviet Constructivist theory about architectural space and how it has the ability to influence behaviour. Does not the ‘architecture’ of the WWW, a public space, break down perceived hierarchies and create an environment that allows and encourages communities to interact? Looked at this way, the computer becomes the liberation machine in a similar vein to modernism’s architectural ‘machines for living’ that were meant to somehow improve us.

There are also ideas pertaining to the pre-psychedelia, 1950s modernism of the International Typographical Style and its demand for clarity in design that are useful to us when trying to articulate the utopian nature of the Web. In web design Usability Heuristics demands similar things from its designers. The doctrine of usability suggests that with usability comes sociability.

With post-modern utopian notions of connectivity and the transcendence of national, institutional and political boundaries, are we being starry eyed in our optimism, or should we be harking back to the days of clean lines and Soviet-style functionality? The belief that new media benefit society through their attack on perceived hierarchies, and that the web is a great leveller, can be countered by the equally valid argument that the Web is undermining intellectual authority, generating failed spaces that are hostile, that threaten individual and collective security and help to circulate false information and dangerous ideas.

Is the computer best understood, then, with reference to modernist or post-modernist ideas of utopia's and dystopia's?

Digital Culture 3: Archive Fever

Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture by Darren Tofts & Murray McKeich.

The above book Memory Trade: A Prehistory of Cyberculture, is full of digital illustrations of bodies by Murray McKeich that are part Svankmajer, part Giger and part Tetsuo: both surreal and technofetishist in nature.

Chapter 3: Total Recall.

"The appeal of recollection is this jump by which I place myself in the virtual" - Gilles Deleuze.

This chapter deals with the technology of writing as an extension of human memory. It gives us a history of technologies: from the ancient Egyptians and the Greeks: the Socratic complaint about logocentrism; to the the calculating machines of Liebeniz and Babbage.

Vanervar Bush

Memex (1945)

"He [mankind] has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory."

Ted Nelson

Hypertext was coined by the researcher Ted Nelson to define writing done in a non-linear or consequential verbal structures made possible by the computer. The use of hypertext would produce an essay or story that would offer multiple paths of alternate paths in linking segments. Literature in Nelson's mind is characterized as a system of interconnected documents.

Hypertext presents cultural artefacts that are interactive, that is pluralistic in its discourse and polyvocal, freeing the reader from the dominance of the author. Hypertext enables scholars to find linkages through tracing keywords through single books and whole bodies of scholarship.

Borges, The Library of Babel: http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html

Cyberspace

"A year here and he still dreamed of cyberspace, hope fading nightly. All the speed he took, all the turns he'd taken and the corners he'd cut in Night City, and still he'd see the matrix in his sleep, bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void."
– Neuromancer

Cyberspace has more literary origins. According to The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (1995) describes cyberspace as a “virtual world” that “is being developed through the interface of the human mind and computer technology. It is an electronically defined world in which a human can experience an environment completely outside the one that he or she physically occupies. The term was coined by the science fiction writer William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, although his imaginative rendition of the concept is a good deal ahead of the technology presently available and more dystopian than most writing on the subject. (Kostelanetz, R., 2001 p. 152)

Source:
Kostelanetz, R (2001) Dictionary of Avant-gardes (2nd Edition) New York: Routledge

Ross Bleckner: 1

Ross Blecker’s work started off in the late seventies producing black and white geometric paintings that look like the abstractions of Moholy-Nagy of the 1920s, albeit in two tone. Then there were his stripe pictures and his “atmospheric” paintings, which have been referred to as “post-nuclear Impressionism”. The “atmosphere” that Bleckner achieved in his works is something I have aimed to produce within my photogram pieces and within the digital images. There is a concern for light that is reminiscent of Reinhardt, Rothko and Newman. These artists are not easily to lump together for critical, theoretical, theological, aesthetic and philosophical reasons, although they are abstract artists and are part of the New York art scene of the 40s and 50s.

Light and Photography

The work that I am currently producing has made me consider the use of light in photography. Light is a basic element in every photograph. The imagery I presented in the previous post looks sometimes over exposed.

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, “believed that photography, was primarily the result of manipulating light” (Mora, G., 1996 p. 115). Moholy-Nagy “took literally the German word for photography (Lichtbild, ‘light image’ and described himself as a lichner, or ‘one who works with light’” (Mora, G., 1996 p. 115).

Moholy-Nagy is of course well known for his photograms. Many photographers by directing light to record the silhouettes of objects positioned on light-sensitized paper.
“Thanks to [light] one can make something important appear in objects without importance” (Willy Zieke).