2011 integrated media notes: Links are Edits

Let's begin by thinking about the role of the edit in cinema, and in cinema history, which is where we more or less ended up last week. How it brings together different things, but also can create different meanings, what is known as the Kuleshov effect. If an edit can do this how? It would seem to indicate that meaning is outside of the shot, somewhere. Also if joining two things makes them connected this seems to be an act of force, not corporal or martial force, but a semiotic or other sense of force. I guess here I should also think about edits as a basic materiality of cinematic practice.

Now an edit is not true or false, it isn't even right or wrong. It is felicitious, there are good enough, and not so good edits. They are not facts but promises. As promises they perform something in their doing, as you do it it simultaneously performs it. This is what an edit does, "I am joining these and because I am joining these their connection matters and they are related".

Now, transpose that to hypertext and links. Is it the same economy? Which bits are different? Is it possible or reasonable to argue that

1. edits create connections between disjointed bits
2. links create connections between disjointed bits
3. edits in audio and video connect one bit to one bit and one bit only (out of a multitude of possibilties)
4. links in hypertext (in a real hypertext) create a connection from one thing to a multitude of others - the possibility of multiple connections is retained
5. k-films realise this literally

Films (for example) and sound work often conceals this fact. We might use stories, character psychology and motivation, and contintuity, to hide what edits actually do, but if they didn't actually have this force why on earth would we need to put in so much energy to hide them? (Hide what, exactly? Why did the question ever arise in the first place that things needed to be hidden?)

It might be good to just imagine what it was like when cinema first arrived. Why was it not immediately obvious that you could cut film, and join it to another bit? Why did this have to be learnt?

So, if edits are links, and links are edits, is a k-film just the same as an ordinary film? What role does an edit now have? The audience? What are we watching? Are we watching or doing something else?

Some key words for this week:

• ergodic narrative
• Kuleshov effect
• incorporeal transformations
• cloudy hypertexts

If you were making a hypertextual video system what should it be able to do?

• connect one to many
• represent relations or structure in multiple ways
• have rules about what can be connected, when
• indicate connections (links) to the user
• provide a history
• provide time based connections
• provide connections from parts of the image
• provide control over how likely something is to be found/followed
• provide control over how often something can be viewed (state information)

Which of these does Korsakow support?

As a late afterthought, I think this is the logic of my argument here:

I think my logic goes much like this:

1. film is made up of small bits that always make sense, whether cut or not;
2. film changes its meaning based on what is joined to what;
3. Kuleshov proves this and it is the entire 'rule' that has made what we understand cinema to be, possible;
4. if the meaning of something changes by virtue of what happens or is shown next, then some facet of meaning is not equal to, or contained, in the shot but is produced by the connections between shots;
5. hypertext works the same way, the famous hypertext fictions (for example Joyce's "Afternoon: A Story" or Moulthrop's "Victory Garden" rely on this principle);
6. so it would seem hypertext is closer to cinema than literature (postcinematic);
7. this also means that hypertext might help us understand other ways of doing cinema/video;
8. hypertext is like editing except now a shot can be edited to lots of different shots, at different moments;
9. k-films do this;
10. how can edits and links do this?;
11. force of connection (force is external);
12. most theories of editing and hypertext making try to domesticate (tame) this force (make it an 'inside' when it is actually an 'outside');
13. but this force is poetic and exceeds boundaries;
14. a useful way to think of this is as speech acts because like speech acts links only 'work' in being enacted, in being followed, and it is in being followed (and not as some sort of separate interpretation after the event) that they happen;
15. and like speech acts they are not true or false, just more or less good;
16. and like promises they are performed in doing (a link, like an edit, is only and always a promise);
17. and so the structure of a K-film is not so much a map as a set of virtual possibilities;
18. and this structure arises in and through the viewing

References (aka Optional Readings)

Joyce, Michael, "Afternoon: a Story" (Watertown (MA): Eastgate Systems, 1987).

Moulthrop, Stuart, "Victory Garden" (Watertown (MA): Eastgate Systems, 1991).

Miles, Adrian, ‘Cinematic paradigms for hypertext’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 13 (1999), 217-226. http://vogmae.net.au/research/thinking/Cinematic-Paradigms-For-Hypertext/

Aarseth, Espen J., ‘Introduction: Ergodic Literature’, in Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1997), pp. 1-23.

Tosca, Susana Pajares, ‘The Lyrical Quality of Links’, in Hypertext '99 (Darmstadt: ACM, 1999), pp. 217-8. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=294911

Tosca, Susana Pajares, ‘A Pragmatics of Links’, in Proceedings of the Eleventh ACM on Hypertext and Hypermedia (San Antonio (TX): ACM, 2000), pp. 77-84. http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=336327

modified: Mon 2 May 2011 | created: Thu 25 Feb 2010
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