Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead

Among a collection of mounted kitchen utensils, what appears to be the scraps of a lithographic magazine advertisement remain on the wall in Walker Evans’s “Kitchen Wall, Alabama Farmstead” (1936, gelatin silver print).  Hamlin Garland documented the practice in his collection of stories Main-Traveled Roads (1891).

Then they entered the house, into the sitting room, poor, bare, art-forsaken little room, too, with its rag carpet, its square clock, and its two or three chromos [chromolithographs] and pictures from Harper’s Weekly pinned about.

-Hamlin Garland, “The Return of a Private”

Then came again the assertive odor of stagnant air, laden with camphor; he felt the springless bed under him, and caught dimly a few soap-advertising lithographs on the walls.  He thought of his brother, in his still more inhospitable bedroom, disturbed by the child, condemned to rise at five o’clock and begin another day’s pitiless labor.

-Hamlin Garland, “Up the Coulee“

Vladimir Zworykin shows us how to love a 19-inch Motorola

Television remains a blind spot for media theory.  From postwar newspaper reviewers to cultural studies academics, the impossibility of isolating the scope of the televisual “text” to a single unit of analysis has posed a great challenge for many critics. In coming to terms with the fact of television, a great amount of time is spent on the effort of wrapping some sort of intelligible model around the sheer pervasiveness of the medium.

A common fallback position is to simply say that television has no attributes of its own.  It is not a medium––let alone an art form––with any distinctive features.  TV reviewer Richard Burgheim, in the August 1969 issue of Harpers:  “Television … is not one of the arts but a mere transmitter of them. How do you love a 19-inch Motorola or a network vice-president?”

Raymond Williams writes with similar conviction in that seminal book with the perfect subtitle, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (1974):

Unlike all previous communications technologies, radio and television were systems primarily devised for transmission and reception as abstract processes, with little or no definition of preceding content.  When the question of content was raised, it was resolved, in the main, parasitically. (18)

Content was merely an afterthought to the primary economic incentive to develop and construct a television infrastructure.  “The general social definition of ‘content’ was already there” (22), providing a store of earlier social forms and events in order to serve the expansion of the broadcast apparatus:  news, sporting events, debates, and techniques stolen from theatrical and motion picture language.

And yet there always seems something wrong with this tried and true fallback position.  Burgheim at once poses and shies away from the exact question we should be asking: how do we love a 19-inch Motorola?

Inventor of the iconoscope Vladimir Zworykin counts the ways in the less excitingly subtitled Television: The Electronics of Image Transmission (1940). Co-authored with his colleague at RCA G.A. Morton, this book is an important and overlooked primer for attuning narrative analysis to the specificities of a given medium. After six hundred pages detailing the physics of electrons and fluorescence, the principles of UHF transmission and reception, and several working prototypes of complete tv systems, Zworykin devotes the concluding section of the book to what is no less than a poetics of television programming––programming which did not yet exist. Read the rest of this entry »

InterNyet

Attended a talk today titled “the Free Market Failure of the Soviet Internet” at the Center for Information Technology Policy. The speaker, Ben Peters, described the fascinating ways in which the political ideology and the institutional structures of the Soviet system influenced the construction of an ultimately unrealizable data communications network–a top-down, hierarchically centralized network that never fully took off in the way that the distributed organization of ARPANET did in the United States.

According to Peters, the Soviets attempted to build their data network as if it were an economy. It’s data center was physically located in Moscow (though outside the city center to avoid missile attacks), with secondary nodes located in strategically placed locations, each feeding the rest of the country.

He also argued for a complicity between these designers’ plan for the computer allocation of resources (a factory reports its production rates, depots and stores report their inventories) and the dream of the eventual triump of socialism becoming communism. According to one of the Soviet scientists, economics was “a scab on the healthy workings of the political body” that a cold computer logic would correct. See also this article by Slava Gerovitch.

So I’m thinking about this relationship between economic policy and network architecture, and then I read the following from Nicholas Carr’s recently published The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google. Commenting on the fact that we now tend to Google a piece of information two or three times rather than choosing to remember it for ourselves, Carr writes,

On the Internet, we seem impelled to glide across the slick surface of data as we make our rushed passage from link to link. And this is precisely the behavior that the Internet, as a commercial system, is designed to promote. We are the web’s neurons, adn the more links we click, pages we view, and transactions we make–the faster we fire–the more intelligence the Web collects, the more economic value it gains, and the more profit it throws off. (228)

Soundscapes

An abstracted and tentative outline of history professor Emily Thompson‘s interesting book, The Soundscape of Modernity. Note that this is not her table of contents, but my own sense of the book’s formal arc. Maybe it’s strange to extract this outline from an already mapped out narrative of events, but there has always been something about historiography—that is, the writing of history—that makes me uneasy. Using narratives to stitch together an event makes more sense to me than using events to stitch together a narrative. The former construction seems more proud of its stitches.

1) traditional sound, space, and listening – surveys some final intersections of reverent performance spaces and music as Art with a capital ‘A’ before the opening of Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1900, the first building engineered with the new science of acoustics developed by Wallace Sabine. The strange condition of listening as “a way to worship at the temple of great art” (47) and “an elevating mental recreation which is not an amusement” (49). The relationship of these three elements—space, sound, and listening—begins to shift around this historical period.

2) sound rediscovered – The experienced (shells) and applied (proto-radar) sound of WWI. The process of listening and the concept of sound become increasingly externalized as machines come to help us understand the physics of sound. From its very inception, our understanding of the physical reality of sound is mediated. Amazingly, a formal science of sound didn’t really exist until the early 1900s.

3) noise – the new problem of uncontrollable “noise pollution” in the modern city from 1900-1933.

4) listening redefined – cathedrals and temples begin using new sound muffling technologies in order to hollow out a silent, reverent interior space by merging new technologies with classical design. The natural sound signatures that had always been ascribed to certain types of spaces become a thing of the past.

5) space redefined – “modern” architecture in late 1920s begins to hermetically seal off outside noise pollution and integrate all interior systems: acoustic insulation, ventilation, and lighting all work in concert. The advent of wholly manufactured interior environments.

6) sound redefined – newly engineered sounds that are freed from spatial restrictions by radio, phonograph, and telephone, begin to fill these hermetically sealed spaces.