Since its publication in 2003, Jonathan Sterne’s The Audible Past has become a staple in the growing field of sound studies. A story about the development of sound-reproduction technologies, Sterne’s book was one of the first in a now well-populated list of scholarship across many different disciplines that aims to rigorously examine sound as an historical, analytic, and philosophical category. Recently referencing The Audible Past on his blog, Sterne writes,
I guess the main thing to say is that the book was written at a time where there wasn’t a whole pile of other contemporary scholarship on sound that was aware of OTHER scholarship on sound. So there is a lot of effort to think through what it means to talk about sound in the humanities and why that matters. I’m not sure someone starting a sonic project today has to do that kind of work or deal with that kind of problem.
The foundational status of this book may account for some of its slightly awkward moments. Neologisms such as the “Ensoniment” (as opposed to Enlightenment) take some getting used to, and continuous polemics against the “visual bias” in the humanities at times become redundant (if only because the field of sound studies has since gained so much traction). But the conceptual trajectory of the book as a whole is so well organized, one which makes such a pointed intervention not only in the historiography of sound, but of technology in general, that the reader can easily overlook these slight bumps.
The Audible Past surveys the history of––to name only a sample of the devices Sterne deals with in this book––the stethoscope, sound telegraphy, telephone, phonograph, graphophone, gramophone, headsets, recording studios, wax cylinders, and hearing aids. However, Sterne is careful to characterize the scope of his study as “a deliberately speculative history” (27). In the book’s introduction, entitled “Hello!”, Sterne acknowledges the massive task facing the historian of sound-reproduction technologies. Rather than aspiring to any claims of exhaustiveness or finality, Sterne writes, “this book uses history as a kind of philosophical laboratory” (27), an approach that requires the book to “continually move between the immediate and the general, the concrete and the abstract” (29). From long forgotten aberrancies such as the ear phonautograph (constructed out of an actual cadaver ear) to modern telephone networks, Sterne seeks to locate amid these various devices a unifying set of cultural practices and beliefs. Read the rest of this entry »
(Warning–several spoilers below, beyond what can pretty much be inferred from the trailer.)
It’s remarkable the lengths to which one must go these days to completely isolate a character in science fiction. Much of the work of Moon (dir. Duncan Jones) is spent explaining just how it is that a person can become utterly disconnected from the live flow of networks while still being able to receive prerecorded media. So, the conceit here is that we have discovered a way to supply 70% of the Earth’s power with solar energy; that “H3” from the sun is trapped in lunar rock on the dark side of the moon; that Lunar Industries, Ltd. employs a staff of one in its mining colony, Sam (played by Sam Rockwell), whose three-year contract is almost up; that communications relay satellites have been damaged by some solar flare; OR that mysterious dark pylons have been erected around the base in order to block any communication with Earth (not to neglect the ‘fiction’ elements in favor of the ‘science’ determining the protagonist’s seclusion).
This is the first in a series of reversals that Moon performs in relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey. These obelisks, rather than appearing as unknown technological wonders and beacons of interplanetary communication, are used to block any transmission, carving out a solitary, dark space within already given technological systems.
Jones (born Zowie Bowie) obviously wanted Rockwell to have the space he needed in this role, and Rockwell’s particular style works nicely with the overall themes of the film. Hinting at the compressed life span and strange familial ties between identical Sam clones, a humorous father/son relationship develops between various versions. Sam shows Sam how to properly carve wood with the thumb closer to the blade. Sam tells Sam in his more decrepit state, “Jesus, your fly is down. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
The lunar base’s AI, named Gerty and voiced by Kevin Spacey, is also there for Rockwell to play off of. In yet another 2001 reversal, HAL 9000′s strangely emotive red eye is replaced here by Gerty’s small LCD screen with a severely limited range of emoticons––smile, mumble, blank, cry. Gerty’s sole function is to keep Sam safe, apparently even at the expense of the station and its mission. Seeing as this company is willing to dispose of (living) clones and reproduce them ad infinitum, it seems unlikely that they wouldn’t program their steward more thoroughly. If the clone-on-clone relationship more or less works as comic relief, the one between AI and clone is a bit more sappy. Sam at one point declares, “We’re people Gerty, you understand?” When Gerty agrees to erase his own memory so that no trace is left of the Sam clone who rockets back to Earth.
With the dialectic of command/control paranoia and utopian space boosterism of 2001 thoroughly undone, we are left in the face of these sentimental closing moments wondering just what it is the film is getting across. Moon was screened at the Tribecca Film Festival, and the Q&A afterward detracted a bit from any interesting take on the place of the space opera genre in contemporary network, post-cyberpunk culture that the film itself may have had. Especially notable was Jones’s groan-inducing response during a Q&A after the screening to the question of whether this was a critique of corporate culture: “I dunno man, you tell me. I’m just a filmmaker.”
Regardless, the premise itself of isolation within networks does serve as a striking thought experiment–it seems that it’s not just Sam’s psyche that becomes isolated on the dark side of the moon once off the grid. Based on the very logic of this isolation, stored memory (which is implanted and uploaded into the clones) slips out of sync with the “liveness” of the present tense of networks. If there is one thing to take away from Moon’s mash-up of space opera with our contemporary networked discourse, it is the degree to which memory is now fundamentally reliant upon being distributed, networked.
Led by Geoff Ryman, the subgenre known as Mundane-SF was recently showcased in the June issue of Interzone Magazine. The short stories published there follow the program for SF laid out by Ryman’s Mundane Manifesto (no longer online), which, at first sight, seems like little more than a tirade against space opera (no interstellar travel, no extraterrestrial life, no alternate dimensions) and a conservative turn toward the ‘science’ in science fiction (sustainability, genetic engineering, biocomputers, virtual reality). Sadly, much of Ryman’s SF reform movement builds off of a conception of the genre as escapist and childish, as growing out of “an adolescent desire to run away from our world.” Ryman chides, “it’s never too late to grow up.”
In a response to the Mundanes, Ian McDonald writes, “A little thought experiment: if this manifesto had existed in the 1950s, how closely would its SF resemble the world as it exists today?” Does the general lack of rigor Ryman locates in SF extend back to the genre’s earlier days? Should all fiction dealing with interstellar travel and its moral, political, and religious repercussions be dubbed ‘childish’ even though the possibility of a space-faring society was the hard SF trope for at least thirty years? McDonald: “It’s a poor manifesto that would venerate Verne (tech-speculation) but consigns much of H.G. Wells’ core texts to the ‘bonfire of stupidities’ (interplanetary war, aliens, time-travel . . .).” Mundane SF highlights a tension that has existed between the genre’s two poles since its beginnings, between Stanislaw Lem and Robert Heinlein, between Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry. If anything, the concerns of the Mundanes at this moment seem to confirm a science fictional projection by Lem in his 1973 essay “On the Structural Analysis of Science Fiction”:
I believe that the existence and continuation of the great and radical changes effected in all fields of life by technological progress will lead science fiction into a crisis, which is perhaps already beginning. It becomes more and more apparent that the narrative structures of science fiction deviate more and more from real processes, having been used again and again since they were first introduced and having thus become frozen, fossilized paradigms.
While Mundane SF seems to respond to this crisis, an intervention at the level of form would be more welcome then a condemnation of the content of the entire genre as childish escapism.
My reservations aside, the results in this issue of Interzone are mixed. The stories tend to foreground objects, the more successful of which weave them into the everyday life of the characters, the less successful merely listing them like an inventory (“plastic cubes for currency, long cheese, textiles, copper and gold wire from Ormud, wine and distilled wine from Karpat…”) A narrative focus on objects is in itself nothing new, a classic example of this being Maria Irene Fornes’s play Mud in which a set of objects that will be set into motion in the coming action is ceremoniously placed on the mantle at the opening of each scene.
One odd similarity between these stories, with the possible exception of Élisabeth Vonarburg’s “The Invisibles”–an amazing account of, impossibly, becoming lost in isolated bubble cities with five districts, one for each finger–is the relative ease of orientation into the story worlds. Part of the distinct pleasure of reading SF is the process of cataloging those initial elements of narrative noise in the story or novel’s opening pages, the neologisms–”I can’t keep in mind at all times which inertials are following what teep or precog” (Dick)–or oxymorons–”east european steel” (Gibson)–that the reader saves for later assemblage into a coherent world system. Immersion into the Mundane stories is, well, mundane. The transition from our world to that of the story is not very stark, save for its fancy proper nouns: “The distance from Sola to the island of Ureparapara is approximately three hours by boat with an outboard motor, assuming the sea is calm” (Lavie Tidhar, “How to Make Paper Airplanes”). “It was a bright chilly day when the ship came into the harbor, turned gracefully as her sails were lowered while she slid into the end of the dock, her flotation out-riggers nudging up to the tarred wood” (Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, “Endra-From Memory”).
This sense of familiarity, of orienting the stories within our own world, is most successful in R.R. Angell’s “Remote Control,” where a sysadmin watches over a MMOG. Gradually, we realize the avatars of these players or “riders” exist in physical reality. The movements of the riders control “Web-Cam-Servo-Rifle” robots that patrol the US-Mexico border, and players pay for the privilege of logging on and shooting at Mexicans as they attempt to cross. Newbies are harassed for merely maiming the “sheep,” who adapt by crossing en masse and hoping for the best, since the machines can only hold so many bullets. The story is punctuated by the sysadmin’s repeated appeal–”don’t touch my screen!”–pointedly drawing the line between fantasy and reality in the tactility of the first-person shooter genre. Users get ten minutes or three shots, whichever comes first, and players who happen to spawn into an overheated robot must painfully endure “looking around without being able to shoot.” This is simple, effective, classic “what if” SF.
If Mundane SF is to have any significance, it will not reside in a mere shift of locus from outer space to bioterror; it will not be in an attenuation of those themes that have always marked SF as SF (although cross pollination between ‘mainstream’ lit and SF as well as other genre fiction has been very important in the fiction past 10 years–see Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, and collections of McSweeney’s Astonishing Stories). This significance could only be located in what SF has always done best not with its content but with its form, by estranging the flow of everyday life, by seeing its processes through a totality of links with the past.
When Ryman writes, “If there is an estrangement between science and science fiction, then it should be possible to do something about it,” he seems to be pointing toward the perceived atrophy in SF’s ability to imagine probable futures through a significant engagement with current science and technology. The problem seems not to be that “the future is now” and therefore SF has no more purpose, or that our contemporary moment is more science fictional than any work of SF could possibly imagine. The problem as I see it resides with the completeness and speed with which the new is immediately appropriated in contemporary culture. Our blindess to the future is a byproduct of an amnesia toward our technological past. “Cyberspace” is a prime example of this. The internet and its rapidly expanding infrastructure is not some singularity borne directly out of the pages of SF, rendering the genre obsolete and exceeding it in ways that the genre could never hope to encompass (here I’m thinking of William Gibson’s recent, reactionary forays into the present tense). The internet and its thoroughly televisual architecture is an intensification of the same at the price of imagining anything differently. If there is no other configuration of the web thinkable by SF today, then why not?
A true revolution in SF would engage with the possibilities of the form outside of traditional genre fiction boundaries. What do I mean by this? Al Gore’s speeches ten years ago on the “information superhighway.” Advertisements for gadgets that have the ability to prefigure our ineteraction with that technology before it is released. Fiction like Chabon‘s and Lethem‘s. Media theory that uses close readings of SF as jumping off points or inspirations for its own speculative inquiry (see N. Katherine Hayles and Fredric Jameson).
This is the great danger of Mundane SF: that in its misguided emphasis on finding new content for the genre (even though one story is basically the plot of Waterworld, and another is bad cyberpunk), it will forget what the form is capable of. Their use of the term “mundane” itself seems to forget that this word was used as a counterpoint for SF critics in the 60s and 70s. Mundane comes from the latin for “world,” and these critics (esp. Samuel R. Delany) used the term to set SF apart from fiction located in our world. SF would “poise in a tense, dialogic, agonsitic relation to the given” (Delany). While conceivably the term “Mundane SF” could be used as an oxymoron or a program for deploying science fiction’s cognitive estrangement much more closely to the given world (as do Lethem and Chabon who recently won a Hugo), there is little evidence to support this idea. Instead, Ryman glaringly and repeatedly misspells Delany’s name in his writings outlining a program for Mundane SF. In its fetishization of the new at the level of content, Mundane SF forgets the heritage of its own namesake and risks propagating the very historical (and speculative) blindnes it wishes to critique.
[Part 3 in a series. You can read part 1 here and part 2 here.] In an earlier post, I contrasted Bazin‘s theory of film as “physical reality as such” with Georg Tholen’s formulation of the digital as “transmissibility as such.” While celluloid contains a chemical inscription that directly relates to the object it records, digital cinema is constituted by generic code–the pure difference between 1′s and 0′s. How should we conceptualize the middle space wherein text-specific cultural codes are grafted onto generic digital codes? In other words, at what level does actual meaning, or signification come into existence in the transition from “physical reality as such” to “transmissibility as such” in digital cinema?
Motion capture seems poised in a conceptual freeze frame within this transition from the physical to the transferable. Rather than recording images which are put through some recondite process of transduction into digital code, motion capture records discrete points of movement as data.
This technique was a significant part of the collage of digital effects behind Iron Man’s digital armor. From this great article:
For Stan Winston’s Shane Mahan and his suit design team, this required making a suit that could be worn in sections over the visual effects suit Downey wore. “The big challenge was trying to find ways to blend, cross-cut and inter- cut combinations of practical and CGI shots,”says Mahan. “It would be absolutely foolish for me to think that I could pull off every shot in the practical suit, so we created a combination for Robert consisting of the chest piece, helmet and arm sections combined with a full-body motion capture tracking marker suit underneath. It’s a great way to blend the practical with the computer-generated effects, enabling ILM to bridge any gaps between the physical pieces.
Iron Man’s armor itself contains this tension between the trace of physical pieces and constructed code. But motion capture seems to highlight a deeply troubling question about the ontology of the digital image, namely a question of degrees of indexicality. When the raw material taken up by the motion capture camera eye contains no indexical relationship to the physical appearance of the actor, but rather consists already of raw data abstracted form movement, is the “indexical contingency” (as Hansen refers to it in an earlier post) of the motion capture portions of the armor any more compromised than those portions that had existed in material reality on Robert Downey Jr.’s body?
The all or nothing critique of the digital as heralding the death of photography and film seems to lack a significant nuance. Thinking through the “degrees” of indexical contingency in the varieties of the digital image would entail a thorough engagement with Barthes’s “reality effect” (which perhaps finds its counterpoint in motion capture: a hidden language, unreadable between the process of recording and transmission, comes into the service of believably depicting the utterly unrealistic).
In an interview with animation supervisor Kenn MacDonald on the possibilities afforded by the motion capture technique for the recet Beowulf film, “This method of filmmaking gives him freedom and complete control. He doesn’t have to worry about lighting. The actors don’t have to hit marks. They don’t have to know where the camera is. It’s pure performance.”
What “pure performance” seems to imply for the actors is a complete liberation from the constraints of the cinematic apparatus. What “complete control” implies for the filmmakers is the possibility of ubiquitous and invisible manipulation. The actor performs freely on an empty stage while the process of image production and transmission takes place elsewhere, unseen. In this account, it seems as if the actor in the motion capture suit exists somewhere in between cultural and digital codes. She is an organism operating outside the technological apparatus whose body is nevertheless already encoded with data, and it is merely this data that the camera is interested in capturing instead of any indexical image.
Motion capture is at once a separation from or an invisiblity of the apparatus that enables transmissibility—pure performance—and a total saturation of the digital language that enables image production—complete control. The rhetoric of indexical contingency, of realism itself is inverted: the invisibility of the semiotic language (digital code) allows the depiction of the utterly unrealistic: Tony Stark testing his Mk-1 boot-jets and flipping upside down into a wall. In motion capture, the Byzantine process of digital transduction is condensed into the figure of the actor covered in data points: it is an encoding of the body prior to its encounter with the cinematic apparatus.
In the introduction to Siegfried Kracauer’s Theory of Film, Miriam Bratu Hansen writes, “Digital technologies such as computer enhancement, imaging, and editing have shifted the balance increasingly toward the postproduction phase, thus further diminishing the traces of photographic, indexical contingency in the final product” (vii). A powerful trend in post-war film criticism was the argument for the literal quality of the cinematic image, what Hansen here refers to as “indexical contingency.” As Erwin Panofsky described it in a 19** essay “Style and Medium in the Motion Pictures,” “the medium of the movies is physical reality as such. Cinema is committed to communicate only by way of what is real.” André Bazin similarly argued that the cinematic image “redeemed from sin” the false perspectivalism of Western painting. A film theorist deeply influenced by his Catholicism, Bazin writes, “The cinema is objectivity in time.”
While of course this unproblematic collapse of the signifier into the signified has since been tempered, as Hansen’s comment suggests, the mutability of digital images resurrects the discourse (rightly or otherwise) of our fundamentally intuitive understanding of cinema’s direct referentiality, if only as a “trace.” Roland Barthes’s diagnosis of the “reality effect” comes to mind, which posits “a break between the ancient mode of verisimilitude and modern realism,” a discourse “which accepts ‘speech-acts’ justified by their referent alone.” The “reality effect” is constituted by a language whose signified is the very absence of a signifier; it is a language whose aim is to simulate immediate presence. Now that the “indexical contingency” of the cinematic image is no longer a given, one would assume that the mutability of the digital would render the representational apparatus visible. In other words, whatever “traces” were left of the reality effect after theoretical attacks by poststructuralism now flare up because of their (ostensibly) final destruction by the technological attacks of digital code.
Digital cinema therefore, could be assumed to hold a productive relationship with the reality effect, in that it pushes the condition of the image as a signifier to the fore. Bazin’s faith in physical reality becomes skepticism in its digital reproducibility.
But this line of reasoning ignores several key facts about the specificity of this language, or rather the lack thereof. Digital cinema forces us to grapple with the fact that its smallest constituent level exists as the pure difference between 0’s and 1’s, a language that does not consist of linguistic codes or shared systems of meaning. Unlike the grooves of a phonograph record, for example, whose shapes have a direct correlation to the sounds they represent, digital code contains no semiotic specificity. It is a language that need not refer to moving images at all, that could exist as an instruction manual, an x-ray of a tooth, or a scan of a manuscript. The smallest constituent level of digital cinema is simply a neutral delivery system, what Georg Tholen calls “transmissibility as such.”
As Tholen articulates it, “Once ‘0’ and ‘1’ no longer represent something, but become markers of a system within which something appears, it makes possible not only the alternating oscillation of presence and absence but also ‘the universal medium of the electric current’ as a carrier that stays neutral to its message” (SAQ 101:3, 667).
We are faced with a significant problem then: while digital cinema provokes an awareness of the image as a representational language, it is only as a delivery system “neutral to its message” that the digital makes any sense. Nothing of this language remains to be seen, and the critique of the digital is itself rendered binary, a yes/no decision as to whether or not a represented action or object actually happened, was actually there. The problem is that this comes to resemble, once again, the “reality effect” wherein mimesis becomes invisible.
As we stare directly at the (cinematic) apparatus as it constructs a (CGI) biomechanical suit around the body of Tony Stark, what exactly do we see? Not, I think, a representational technique that gives the lie to the super hero genre’s realist aesthetic lifted from Moore/Miller’s 80s graphic novels (the desire to pull every SF element of the super hero genre down to the realm of the possible in the present day). The computer graphics are actually foregrounded here, but to what effect?
