Editing Time (3)

It seems almost heretical to propose that editing is not at the heart of the creative process in film anymore. As my last post suggested meaning creation in the era of new media is no longer dependent on montage, as much as it is on rhythm, sound and layers of multi-faceted images.

The best example of this is that video images are not produced through a series of frames as films are. On the contrary, the CCD array of your conventional video camera is a two-dimensional grid of pixels with sensors that react to light. (“CCD is an acronym for Charge-Coupled Device. It is the image sensor that separates the spectrum of color into red, green and blue for digital processing by the camera. A CCD captures only black-and-white images. The image is passed through red, green and blue filters in order to capture color.”)

The grid is locked and the pattern of pixels is arranged to maximize the subsequent processing of colour. HD cameras are also dependent on this technology and although the images look very rich, they are the result of complex processes of adjustment based on approximations and compression. The point is that nuances are not the strength of video images largely because the computer in digital cameras is working on black and white images and effectively ‘adding’ colour to them based on a set of mathematical formulae.

What then does it mean to edit this material? What is the impact of using Final Cut Pro and other non-linear editing software packages?

Editing Time (2)

I was reminded by one of my graduate students recently that people take so many pictures with digital cameras that the challenge of quality (capturing something unique and beautiful) has been replaced by the challenges of data management, tags and titles.

Read more……

A Torn Page…Ghosts on the Computer Screen…Words…Images…Labyrinths

Exploring the Frontiers of Cyberspace (extracts from a longer piece)

“Poetry is liquid language" (Marcos Novak)

“As a writer of fantasy, Balzac tried to capture the world soul in a single symbol among the infinite number imaginable; but to do this he was forced to load the written word with such intensity that it would have ended by no longer referring to a world outside of its own self…. When he reached this threshold, Balzac stopped and changed his whole program: no longer intensive but extensive writing. Balzac the realist would try through writing to embrace the infinite stretch of space and time, swarming with multitudes, lives, and stories." (Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino)

Is it possible to imagine a labyrinth without a defined pattern, without a center or exit point? What if we enter that labyrinth and wander through its hallways, endlessly opening doors which lead to other doors, with windows which look out over other windows? What if there is no real core to the labyrinth and it is of unknown size? This may be an apt metaphor for virtual reality, for the vast network of ideas which now float across and between the many layers of cyberspace.

“A year ago, I was halfway convinced that cyberspaces where you can experience the sensation of hefting a brick or squeezing a lemon probably won’t be feasible for another twenty or thirty years. A month ago, I saw and felt something that shook my certainty. When I tried the first prototype of a pneumatic tactile glove in inventor Jim Hennequin’s garage in Cranfield, an hour’s drive southwest of London, I began to suspect that high-resolution tactile feedback might not be so far in the future. The age of the Feelies, as Aldous Huxley predicted, might be upon us before we know what hit us." (Howard Rheingold, Virtual Reality, New York: Touchstone, 1992, p. 322)

Sometimes the hallways of this labyrinth narrow and we hear the distant chatter of many people and are able to ‘browse’ or ‘gopher’ into their conversations. Other times, we actually encounter fellow wanderers and exchange details about geography, the time, information gained or lost during our travels. The excitement of being in the labyrinth is tempered by the fact that as we learn more and more about its structure and about surviving within its confines, we know that we have little hope of leaving. Yet, it is a nourishing experience at one level because there are so many different elements to it, all with a life of their own, all somehow connected and for the most part available to us. In fact, even though we know that the labyrinth has borders, it seems as if an infinite number of things could go on within its hallways and rooms. It is almost as if there is too much choice, too much information at every twist and turn. Yet, this disoriented, almost chaotic world has a structure. We don’t know the designers. They may have been machines, but we continue to survive in part because we have some confidence in the idea that design means purpose, and purpose must mean that our wanderings will eventually lead to a destination. (This may be no more than a metaphysical claim, but it keeps the engines of Cyberspace running at high speed.)

In order to enter a virtual labyrinth you must be ready to travel by association. In effect, your body remains at your computer. You travel by looking, by reading, by imaging and imagining. The eyes are, so to speak, the royal road into virtuality.

“Cyberspace — The electronic frontier. A completely virtual environment: the sum total of all [BBSes], computer networks, and other [virtual communities]. Unique in that it is constantly being changed, exists only virtually, can be practically infinite in “size" communication occurs instantaneously world-wide — physical location is completely irrelevant most of the time. Some include video and telephone transmissions as part of cyberspace." (A. Hawks, Future Culture — December 31, 1992)

In the labyrinth of Cyberspace, design is the logic of the system. Cyberspace reproduces itself at so many different levels at once and in so many different ways, that the effects are like an evolutionary explosion, where all of the trace elements of weakness and strength coexist. The architecture of this space is unlike any that has preceded it and we are consequently grappling with discursive strategies to try and describe the experiences of being inside it. The implication is that there is no vantage point from which you can watch either your progress or the progress of others. There isn’t a platform upon which you can stand to view your experience or the experience of your neighbours. In other words, the entire system doesn’t come into view — how could you create a picture of the Internet? Yet, you could imagine the vast web-like structure, imagine, that is, through any number of different images, a world of microelectronic switches buzzing at high speed with the thoughts and reflections of thousands of people. The more important question is what does this imagining do to our bodies, since to some degree Cyberspace is a fiction where we are narrator and character at one and the same time? What are the implications of never knowing the shape and architecture of this technological sphere which you both use and come to depend on? What changes in the communicative process when you type a feeling onto a computer screen, as opposed to speaking about it? What does that feeling look like in print? Does the computer screen offer a space where the evocative strength of a personal letter can be communicated from one person to another?

9/11 Photographs + Imre Kertesz

If you go to Joel Meyerowitz's epic images of Ground Zero some of which are reproduced by The Guardian Newspaper you will be able to read about Meyerowitz's incredible project. He spent nine months on the site of the former World Trade Center.

I was trying to be a historian, to read it and to interpret what I saw. I understood that my reading of this moment was deepened by my personal commitment to it. There were men whose lives I was following; firemen looking for their dead sons. One day, a guy came to me and put his arms around me and said, "I found Tommy. I carried him out in my own arms" and the two of us stood there crying together. That day, I saw everything through the eyes of that father.

(Joel Meyerowitz, quoted in the Guardian Observer, Sunday, August 27, 2006.)

(Aftermath: World Trade Center Archive by Joel Meyerowitz is published on 6 September by Phaidon Press)

I read this article after having completed a longer piece that includes an interview with Imre Kertesz, the great Hungarian author who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2002. The interview appeared in SignandSight which is an online German publication. Kertesz says the following:

We try in vain to recount reality "faithfully" - the moment we start recounting it, we alter it. We lend form to our thoughts and experiences that whirl chaotically, or contrariwise, that lurk in the hidden nooks of our consciousness. The harder we try to render them accurately, the more radically we need to interfere. In other words, everything is fiction, most of all life itself. What's more, even a person is a fiction from the time that he invents himself. Because, at that very moment, his life has been decided in a sense. In my case, that happened some time around 1955, when I decided to become a writer. This moment was the start of fiction, as I imagined myself as a writer, which at the time did not make any sense. In fact, it seemed like a downright implausible decision.

This quote links to some of my earlier comments about images on this web site, but also to what I have been saying about communities and identity. Kertesz does not mean that our lives are a fiction, rather that we construct our identities and in so doing build as much of a fictional universe as a real one. It is the balance between fiction and reality that is at the heart of a struggle within ourselves and with the communities we inhabit.

In my previous Blog entry I mentioned how communities are becoming more and more like villages with all the attendant dangers of parochialism and insularity. These villages are no longer defined by conventional boundaries which makes them all the more difficult to analyse and understand. Kertesz discusses the effects of closed communities in which individuals "do not need to interpret their own needs and life any longer." Instead they resist the "spaciousness" of freedom. This is a crucial insight and one that needs further elaboration and exploration.

Hurricane Katrina

The Sunday New York Times Magazine of August 27th has a poignant and profoundly disturbing article and photo essay on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina with particular emphasis on what happened to the children of the families that were displaced by the storm. The images are very powerful and the reality of what happened, the incompetence of the recovery effort and the lack of attention to the families struggling to remake their lives is disturbing and shocking.

The images made me angry, but also made me feel quite hopeless. Journalists have still not learned that shocking images achieve their effect, but little else. The personal stories of the children were heartbreaking and I felt the need to do something, but other then sending money to the relief effort or writing this short comment, my options remain limited.

This is indeed the challenge of the next few years. How can the information we receive be translated from our personal experiences into action? I have no pat answers to this question. A disturbing pattern has emerged over the last decade or so. More information has not led to more knowledge. Instead, it has led to increasing and sometimes deadly tribal activity. These tribes range from small groups to larger ones, but their common characteristic is a lack of direct response to crucial issues. Their worlds are centered on their own and sometimes parochial concerns. Globalization, it seems, is actually returning us to a more medieval practice of village life, the only difference being that today's villages are not constrained by national boundaries.

If each village were to become the center of new and imaginative activities directed toward social change and equity, then there would indeed be opportunities to support people in need wth a more determined effect and impact than is presently possible. I will discuss this issue in greater depth over the next few weeks in an expansion of earlier posts on communities within the context of what has now become an image-world — old definitions will have to change.

This short piece is dedicated to Michael Merovitz, a very old friend who died recently — a gentle, sweet and wonderful man whose premature death is a deep loss.