vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Slow Cinema Slow Media

Shaun Wilson has created a slow cinema slow media Vimeo group. This is part of the work towards a Slow Cinema symposium being held at RMIT in the middle of 2012.

Theft by Internet

Each year in my role as honours program director I arrange for gift vouchers to go to our external examiners. Most places pay a very modest amount for examinations, and in RMIT’s case this literally requires the completion of three documents for one examiner, and then a long wait for payment. Oh, and a chunk will go in tax. So instead I send an electronic gift voucher for Amazon.com. You can buy what you like, it is still a modest amount but it’s a much nicer thank you than having to provide a slew of personal details for me to complete a crazy amount of paperwork. In 2011 one examiner was Matt Loads, now a colleague of mine here at RMIT. I left out one letter in his email address when I sent out the gift vouchers so he never received one. I have just gone to resend it, only to find that almosthawed@hotmail.com has redeemed the voucher. I don’t know who that is, but it isn’t Matt Loads. Now this isn’t like receiving an anonymous gift voucher. It had a message thanking you for examining an honours thesis for the program at RMIT, and my name on it. This is the email equivalent of finding a wallet and just taking the money. I just tried emailing them, but the email was bounced by hotmail. Closed the account? Taken the money and ran? I really don’t get why you’d take the money, its theft.

Condition One

I already had downloaded Condition One but it took an email from Jay to the Artists in the Cloud list to get me to spend a bit of time with it. It is an app that works as both a front end/shop front to journalistic video but also provides some viewer options that take advantage of some of the affordances of the iPad. The Guardian has played with it, with a series of short videos about Tokyo.

The stories are chunked up, so I can either get the entire Tokyo series (which includes bonus extras) or get four short episodes (between 1 and 3 minutes in length). They’re not small, the one I’m waiting to view is 1:39 in length and 250MB, that’s a shitload of video for less than two minutes of viewing, even at full screen on my iPad, and this Sunday evening things might be slow out there somewhere, but it is going to take quite a while to arrive. Not hours like in the old days (when you would start a download and come back the next morning…) but it’s looking like a good 10 minutes or so, which at the moment I’d have to say is getting in the way of the experience – though I don’t yet know what that experience will actually be.

While I’m waiting for that to happen what gets my goat up just a bit is the spruiking around “immersive” experiences. This is, of course, the pitch point, the point of difference, that which will make it not just different but great. Now, it might be, but immersive, as the work on flow has well and truly shown us, is not about technological ersatz similitude. Shit, novels have already taught us that. I read a novel, even on crappy paper with lousy typesetting, but if it is a good novel, it works. I might cry laugh, weep. I am immersed in my reading. Not because of the quality of the delivery technology. So this risks a techno determinism that thinks if we get it really really shiny (I’m still waiting for my 250MB and 1:39 of video to arrive) then it will be immersive, never mind I’ve twiddled my thumbs for over ten mintues already just waiting to be really really immersed. Immersion is a consequence of things like possible worlds, narrative voice, and how they intersect with my intention. If they intersect, it works, even at low rez. This is the same snake oil that virtual worlds people use to sell us their visions of the future. It is immersive because you get to move in it, as if this is a sufficient condition for what ‘immersive experience’ is actually trying to claim – verisimilitude and an experience that is, at least in some respects and aspects, somehow phenomenologically equivalent to how immersed I am right now sitting at a desk. But simply having to move something (my mouse, my avatar, my iPad) does not make something immersive in this sense, unless we really do just want ‘immersion’ to be more like, well I was going to say sitting in the bath, but that is much more immersive than what is on offer here. I can’t sit in it like I can in my bath, where I am literally immersed and water flows around and over me. In Second Life my avatar might sit, even swim, but I don’t, and in Condition One I’ve got a traditional cinematic perspective which I either swipe around, or move my iPad up down, left right. (I can’t see all the way round, it is more that I’ve shot wide and the default view in the app is narrower, hence I can move around it a bit.) it is sort of nice, and sets up big questions cinematically (how do I know I have not missed something important that happened not off off screen, but off screen, as it were?), with an off screen that is actually available I can now compose and narrate not only in depth (Bazin via Renoir here) but also by implicating and alluding to what is just out of frame, but can be in frame if the viewer moves the frame. But immersive? No. Immersion is a consequence of other modes of engagement, at the moment this is technologically cool, but that of itself is no guarantee of a good view.

Wevideo

Rupert Howe let us all know about wevideo.com over at the artists-in-the-cloud list. So, what is it?

Seems to be another go at video + editing + the cloud, though this one has subscription right from the start. I guess I am not the market for something like this, but even so I struggle a little bit with the vision. I pay (what to me is quite a bit of money for what I get) and for that I can edit video, publish it out to existing hosts, and also co-edit with others out there. There’s a legal music library it looks like I get access to.

Seems its only the collaborative editing that is significant. After all my mac comes with a video editor, I can buy one for my phone for a couple of dollars, and both will auto publish to YouTube. If I want something more sophisticated (which I do) then I also probably need a lot more than what a service like this can do, or would wonder why I’d pay for it when I already have an editor, pay for my own hosting, and so on.

Collaboration? Yeah, ok, but it won’t cope at the pro end so…?

just my thoughts. But I’ve been wrong too often on these things. Though I guess if I was in this space commercially my business plan would be to get some traction and be bought by Google so that it can be rolled into YouTube, which will make me plenty of money but it’s a crappy way to rethink video. Collaboration. Or the cloud.

Lion, Perhaps

First problem with the iBooks authoring application for me is not the EULA (see why people are stuck in old paradigms, and why academics are being just a bit hypocritically precious, for more) but the upgrade to Lion. I’m still on 10.6 (I’ve lost track of all these bloody cats but I think that’s Snow Leopard), which still has Rosetta. There are two applications that I use that require Rosetta. One is just a FileMaker based program that I have used to store all my software licences. It will be dead in Lion. That one’s not so bad, I just need to manually copy the information into a new program (I’m using Wallet, but I might just use Bento instead since Wallet lacks some info and is not particularly flexible).

The second program though is the late, great, LiveStage Pro. This is how I’ve scripted interactive QuickTime, and as far as I’m aware remains the only program around that can do this. They are gone, broke, expunged from the world, and I’ve managed to keep my version running across new computers and OS upgrades for quite a while now. Well, no more.

But hey, I guess if the software has died I need to move on too. Particularly since Apple seem hell bent on giving up on it anyway, as none of them work anymore in the browser as the QT plugin seems to have been dumbed down to just playback duties – all the programmatic stuff that QuickTime has has been quietly removed. To the point where my small interactive works will play just fine in QuickTime Player 7, but in the OS X players, forget it. I’ve no idea why they have killed such a powerful technology, I assume because Flash quick programmatic QuickTime, and now the battle is simply about video.

Of course I still have faith that new, multilinear and interactive personal video forms will arrive. Real soon now. HTML5, javascript, CSS, et al…

Academics are Whingers

I wrote last week why the general tone of the criticism of Apple’s new iBook Authoring app End User Licence Agreement was an example of media commentators not actually understanding how the shape of the industry/platform/assemblage had changed around them, without anyone realising. This time, it is about academics.

I’m an academic. I write stuff for journals, and while I haven’t written a book the model is much the same. It more or less looks like this: I write, the work has to be peer reviewed, and often edited. This is done by other academics. If accepted it is then published. If it is a commercial academic publisher (so everyone except open access) the book or journal will have a subscription cost. At no point in this will I ever receive any payment. For a book, unless I’m an international superstar, I may receive royalties, though these will be very minor. If it is a book it is common to sign an agreement that provides the publisher with a licence to republish in any media, in any format, in perpetuity. For free.

So, summary: academics provide all the intellectual labour, for free, then pay to read the material that they have produced themselves, and often sign an agreement which means the publisher can do what they like with the material forever, anywhere. The publishers along they way pocketing profits.

Now, let’s put this in the context of iBooks Author. Here I can write stuff. I can presumably get it edited and reviewed if I like. I can distribute it internationally to an enormous audience. I can set a price if I think it is worth it, the majority of which I will receive. Apple will take a commission. Financially this is the opposite of the current model where the publisher takes most of the money and pay me a small commission.

Imagine a group of like minded academics self forming as an editorial board, and deciding to publish iBooks, either for free or a small cost to cover design costs. We could publish course notes, curriculum, research, ideas. All these could be in each book or journal, or form series of their own. Though I do like the idea of something like an iBook that is more magazine that mixes this stuff up. Could have video, audio, image, text, links out.

All the tools to do this are on pretty much every first world academic’s desktop right now. But instead there is a pile of complaining about how if we make something in this system it has to be distributed via Apple. Jesus Christ, talk about ivory towers, we sign away all our rights to academic publishers every day, yet from the humanities academy there is nary a word of complaint. Our myopia can be daunting at times.

Why the EULA is the wrong end of the stick

1. History, the iPod.
I watched the first iPod key note after Jobs died, and it was the first time I got the model. It wasn’t ‘do differently’ but much simpler – “all you have to do is do it better” – or words to that effect. The first iPod, not 100 songs but a 1000. Not the size of a small paperback but a deck of cards. Not 2 minutes of skip protection but something crazy like an hour, easier to use, and better sound. Cost a packet, way more than every other mp3 player on the market. The difference? Design of course, not just industrial design but experience design and what today is known as service design. This was not just the iPod but also importantly iTunes, a free bit of software that let you manage your music. Then your iPod, and then it became the front end to the music store.

Notice the important bits. iTunes is free, it is software, we think of it as the ‘front end’ but from Apple’s point of view it is really the back end into their music retail empire and a bit of service orientated hardware. It is software + hardware + media. It relies upon existing things (we like music, we pay for it, it is really easy to carry with you and listen to while doing other things), and just makes it easier, and better to do.

2. A digital lifestyle ecology
So this shifted Apple out of being a hardware or a software company. It is now a digital lifestyle service design company that controls, designs, owns, and manages all parts of its systems. So they no longer design a thing like a computer but instead an experience, it is about what you can do with it, and they make sure that that ‘doing’ is as simple and easy to do so that anyone can pretty much get the gist of it (watch a 3 or 4 year old with an iPad). They make sure there is content of some sort, as well as the opportunity to make, share and play. Each of these is important, and easy to do.

3. The app store change (low friction service)
Now once they worked out that the music model works – enough people will pay for the music if you make it easy and cheap enough to do so to make it worth Apple and the music industry’s time – they replicated it with the iPhone and apps. They invented a market for generally low cost bits of software that did little things, hopefully very well. They needed hardware that had enough grunt and smarts (location awareness, a camera, and so on), but because they control the hardware it means if the app complies, it will work. You can only do this if you control the hardware. But the shift in the app store from the music store is that Apple now defined themselves as a publisher. They did this without any of the publishers actually noticing – inventing in the process possibly the only current viable publishing model for our digital economy, and it worked. This is why they will refuse some apps, because they are a publisher, for exactly the same reason that a book publisher will not publish anything that is submitted – for reasons of quality, taste, business, politics, legals (and so on). Apple have been quite explicit about this (Jobs again with his declaration that they will not publish porn).

This causes friction, because those of us on the software side of the fence think if I write a program then it is only up to the user whether or not it gets used. Not some intermediary taking a cut. Except they are no longer a software or hardware company, they aren’t thinking like one, but we still are. On the other hand the ecology of iTunes to iPhone and iPod, and iTunes to the music and app store, via your account, is very low friction (I impulse shop there, and at Amazon for Kindle titles, all the time).

On the other hand because they control the platform it makes writing and publishing easier if you’re a developer. You know what the video format is, the required data rate and pixel dimensions, if you match that, it will play. It is (not quite) pretty close to publish once, run always, which from the user point of view is a god send (how often do you have to troubleshoot an app on an idevice?). This really does matter (we are nerds so think it doesn’t but imagine if you had to tinker with your car on nearly every trip to town, personally I’d give up pretty quickly and rely on my bike).

4. iTunes U, iBooks 2, and that new free app
Same scenario, and the uproar (this is a good sample) about the End User Licence Agreement (EULA) is misreading what Apple have done. (This is not arguing that what they’ve done is right or good, but that we are looking at it from the wrong point of view.) We see the free software, and what it can do, and we think it is about the software. We think the software is the ‘front end’. From Apple’s point of view it is the back end. The front is the new iTunes U and their move into the education market. Like music (and now apps), there is an existing market. A large industry with resources. An audience. They have a platform and now a format that is possibly highly compelling (the Kindle solved buying and reading books finally on a device, but they are still very much books, iBooks 2 are illuminated interactive knowledge manuscripts, they’re so far away from what you do on a Kindle to be a different species all together and for education they are very much what we should be doing). The app is a way to seed that market, but here they are playing a role that falls precisely in between the music and the app store. There are publishers with content so Apple can be their shopfront to the iPad (that’s the music model) But with the app anyone can now make stuff, and give it away or sell it, via their shop front (that’s the app store model).

The thing we are missing is that it isn’t about the app, it’s about the shop and Apple is in the media publishing industry (this is the sort of thing Murdoch and their sort should have done years ago if they actually didn’t have their collective heads so far up their heritage media business models). The app is just like any other self publishing print on demand site out there on the web that lets you upload stuff to be templated into their boilerplate and sold through their site (with a cut to them). But way sexier, smarter and useful (it ain’t print for starters).

So, they can insist on that EULA because they aren’t a software company (but we are still treating them like they are, they’ve moved way past that and we’re the ones left behind here) but a publisher, and the app is just a bit of service software that feeds into the larger system. Without even thinking the agreement is a good idea (I personally don’t agree with it) I don’t know of anyone who thinks a publisher should a) give away what they print for free, or b) let anyone use their hardware/IP (in Apple’s case basically iTunes and the iPad) to sell stuff for free. This is pretty much the same strategy that Amazon have tried to do with their new Kindle Fire, where the biggest and best feature consistently noted by reviewers is how well integrated into the Amazon retail system it is. Same deal, the software nerds are becoming not the tool makers, but the publishers.

| There’s No Need to Bite the Breast |

Original Citatio:
Miles, Adrian. “There’s No Need to Bite the Breast.” Journal of Digital Information 3.3 (2003).

An archive of all the essays that made up the special issue on hypertext criticism, that this was a contribution to, is available at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/117

There’s No Need to Bite the Breast

This is a short piece that appeared in an issue of the Journal of Digital Information that was dedicated to hypertext criticism. I wrote three short pieces for the issue, where the editors specifically wanted short sharp interventions. This short piece is about reading hypertext and teaching students how to read hypertext (so I guess it is actually about a network literacy after all!).

There’s no Need to Bite the Breast

Object relations psychology has, on occasion, been used to consider our relationship to art, and more specifically to account for the presence of art (Wright, 1984). One particular form of object relations psychology, largely the province of D.W. Winnicott (1982), develops the idea of the breast as a ‘transitional object’ for the child. The transitional object is that thing that the child uses to mediate its first experiences of itself as an entity separate in the world.

Imagine the infant’s point of view, it is hungry and the breast (or its equivalent) appears, and so there is a strong sense that the child imagines they have created and control the breast. As the child develops physically and psychically a time comes when the breast does not appear ‘magically’ when desired and the child becomes understandably angry and so wishes to punish this ‘object’ – the breast is bitten. For Winnicott this is a continuation of the child’s fantasy, it still thinks the breast is under their control and so now wishes for it to be banished.

Of course, it returns, and it is the manner and persistence (in time and perhaps temper) of this return that allows the child to learn that the breast is external to itself and in fact independent of the child’s desires. It is the manner and persistence of this return that Winnicott, perhaps problematically, describes as ‘the good enough mother’. This figure (which it should be stressed is what we would today recognise as the child’s primary care giver) of the good enough mother is the person who helps ground this originary transitional object which mediates our place in the world.

In relation to art some theorists have suggested that the experience, presence, and use of art is essentially as a transitional object. Art is something that mediates our relation to the world and the real, yet it is also something that in many ways dissolves or at least plays with the security of our identity. Wright (1984) introduces this reasonably thoroughly, and it is also more or less the position that someone like Julia Kristeva (1984) takes in relation to particular forms of modernist writing.

In critical writing that explores hypertext, when introducing students to reading hypertext, or when ‘traditional’ readers approach hypertext, it is surprisingly common to find responses that are, in essence, biting the breast. The methodology for this is banal, and is largely founded on a refusal or inability (unwillingness?) to acknowledge the work as outside of and separate from the reader. In the case of students who first confront a hypertextual fiction it generates a series of readings that may appear naïve, except they have invested so heavily in specific assumptions and ideologies of textual pleasure and closure that they lack the innocence of the genuine naif. Unfortunately, it appears that much the same can be said of more mature critical writing (for instance Miall and Dobson 2001, and Birkerts 1996).

To respond in this manner to hypertext it is usually important to posit specific assumptions about what constitutes narrative pleasure. The list is usually a conservative one derived from some avatar of closure and what Barthes’ (1977) and his heirs would immediately recognise as the readerly, and then to rail against the work because it doesn’t actually provide this. You punish the object because it doesn’t give you the mastery and pleasures (whether this is narrative coherence, closure, or even scopophilic mastery — you can’t see it all and it looks unattractive) that you have taken as your right, you bite the breast.

I’d suggest the problem with criticism that bites the breast is that first of all it simply hasn’t recognised that the work is an entity in its own right, and as such is not subject to your whim. This is more significant than it might appear precisely because, as art, one of the things it is probably going to do is to play with those things that separate “I” from “it” and it might not want, or even be able, to give you what you expect or want. Secondly, when the work is recognised as something independent we are in a much better position to ask questions of why it might do what it does. Rather than punish it because it doesn’t have an ending (for instance), what might happen if we asked instead, why doesn’t the work want to end? Or why does the work feel unable to end? Why is it scared of ending? Or even why am I threatened by not finding an end?

(Of course the irony here is that I could be asking this of Beckett, yet it’s rather harder to find someone with a lit. major to bite that particular breast.)

Kafka, if my history is adequate, never finished a novel. The interesting and productive critical work in that context is not that which condemns the work as broken and incomplete but instead recognises this as a problem that lets us move towards the heart of what the works are about. Or, as I remind students, a hypertext asks questions of us, not the other way round, and you have to learn how to listen. If you don’t, you will only find yourself condemning hypertext for not being something else. Let’s get over it. Because a work does not do what we think it is supposed to do is not a reason to condemn it. Nor is it criticism.

Barthes, Roland. “From Work to Text.” Trans. Stephen Heath. Image–Music–Text. London: Flamingo, 1977. 155–64.
Birkerts, Sven. The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Kristeva, Julia. Revolution in Poetic Language. Trans. Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
Miall, David S, and Teresa Dobson. “Reading Hypertext and the Experience of Literature.” Journal of Digital Information 2.1 (2001).
Winnicott, D.W. Playing and Reality. London: Routledge, 1982.
Wright, Elizabeth. Psychoanalytic Criticism: Theory in Practice. London: Routledge, 1984.

| Intent is Important |

Original Citation:
Miles, Adrian. “Intent Is Important (a Sketch of a Progressive Criticism).” Journal of Digital Information 3.3 (2003).

An archive of all the essays that made up the special issue on hypertext criticism, that this was a contribution to, is available at http://journals.tdl.org/jodi/article/view/117

Intent Is Important

This is a short piece about hypertext criticism that I wrote for an issue of the Journal of Digital Information that was dedicated to hypertext criticism. The editors sought (and received) brief pieces from a variety of contributors. In this brief essay I argue for the materiality of hypertext as a necessary part of interpretation while arguing that the intent of the work is the work for itself, not to be confused with the intent of the author, reader, narrator or whatever.

Intent is Important (a sketch for a progressive criticism)

A no doubt apocryphal story about the original writers of “Cahiers du Cinema” – a famous and at the time of its founding revolutionary cinema studies journal – was that they were only allowed to write about films that they liked. The rationale for this was that it was easy to write about what you didn’t like, and that in responding to what you did not like you did not need to ‘listen’ or pay attention to the film, that it would only ever be writing as ressentiment. Similarly, to write about something you did like was understood to be a more difficult and productive undertaking, in attempting to locate and describe why you like something you’re required to affirm and make visible what may not be immediately apparent. You have to ‘listen’.

Now while this may have been a useful procedure in the 1950s it is much more difficult to accept such a view of critical practice in 2002. Or is it?

I’d like to propose that it does actually offer a viable methodology, as long as some romantic and idealist assumptions are suitably redressed for our late postmodern times. It would be reasonable to believe that those of us engaged in critically writing on specific hypertexts do wish to affirm something about hypertext and the text’s we’re confronting. Even where the critical writing may be thought of as negative there is still some sense in which the work is an effort at affirmation. For instance, it may be a way of illustrating a particular agenda for what hypertext ought to be, or more simply to provide examples for theoretical claims about hypertext in general.

However, it doesn’t have to be as complicated as this, and certainly to institute a progressive form of hypertext criticism some simple tenets could serve us well. What I have in mind is the rehabilitation of intent for critical practice where this practice is specifically engaged with the interpretation of hypertext works – as opposed to more abstract theory.

(This rehabilitation is, I suppose, not very far removed from Gadamer’s (1976) argument for the importance of recognising prejudice as a proactive or productive force in our engagement with the text as an Other. )

Intent is not to be confused with the intent of the author – Barthes (1977) and Foucault (1977) shared the shovel in well and truly burying the author some time ago – but it is to recognise that there is an intent in the work to the extent that the work intends to do something for an Other. This Other includes other works, the readers it requires to realise itself, and even its own material conditions. The work means, and we need to give this some imperative force, that is to recognise that the work demands to mean something and that this demand to mean is a demand made in and of itself. Not the author, not the reader, but the work.

Such an approach could be misunderstood as a naive hermeneutics, and if so I would radicalise this by recognising that the intent of the work is, literally, the works and so it is, if you prefer, a posthuman hermeneutic. What this means in practice is very simple and is really only making literal the general claims of poststructuralism, claims that hypertext criticism seems to have been well able to adopt in general discussion of hypertext in the abstract, but has resolutely struggled with when engaging with specific titles.

For example, poststructuralism demonstrates forcefully the way in which we are subjected to language (leaving aside the problem that poststructuralism tends to treat language as the gestalt for all other systems, which is plainly inadequate and wrong). As we use language we think we are in charge, we get to choose our words, sentences, and certainly in vernacular English there are an infinite set of possible utterances available to us. Now, while we get to choose which words, we don’t really get to choose, as individuals, what words get counted as words. Nor for that matter do we have much say over what they mean, hence the problem that everyone has, all the time, in struggling to say what they mean. But again, it isn’t as complicated as that. An example I often use with my students to make this concrete for them is the following word game, which only really works with native speakers of English. It goes something like this: “what rhymes which shop and you buy at the butchers?” The class answers “chop!”. I then ask “What do you do at a green light?” And pretty much without fail the class answers “stop!”. It usually takes a little while, but someone eventually realises (though often I have to point the error out) that no, you’re not supposed to stop at green lights. The point? That there is a material logic to language that completely overruns, subverts, and corrupts logic as reason. It is easy and trivial to do. Reason, that grounding of ego and subjectivity in self assured centredness, is not the ruler we think it is.

In the context of hypertext criticism what is required is the recognition that when we are interpreting and critiquing a work there are similar material elements (inevitably multiple) that inhabit the work, and that while there probably cannot be right or wrong interpretations, there can certainly be better and worse. The better critiques are those that are able to identify, that is to show, what different material elements are present in a work – authorial intention could certainly be one, but only one, of these – and what they appear to be doing. Again, what they are doing is up to them, that is I am arguing that we ought to think of the work (and not it’s ‘producer’) as more or less being like a psyche in its own right and so subject to consideration in the same terms. What we interpret when we do hypertext criticism then ought to be the work, and once we recognise the work as an intending entity in itself it becomes unproblematic to acknowledge that it will, for instance, have its own unconscious, its own bits that it doesn’t know about or understand.

This has been the hallmark of deconstructive practice where the so called ‘deconstructive turn’ has always been to show how a work which thinks it is logically coherent and whole, in fact contains within itself the very terms, ideas or material expressions that render this coherence complicit with what it thinks it does not need, nor know.

However, a progressive hypertext criticism does not need the arsenal of deconstruction to legitimate itself, it simply needs to recognise that the text is the entity under consideration, and that the text as an entity in itself is simultaneously entire and incomplete. It exists as itself but of course never does so without a complex set of contextual constraints and enablers. These include what we recognise as intertextuality and authorial intent but it also includes the material resistance of code, screen, interface, bandwidth and browser space, it might also include the recalcitrance of the hypertextual object to never quite be what it desires to be.

A simple example from hypertext will, I hope, indicate what I mean by all this. In Caitlin Fisher’s “These Waves of Girls” we find a hypertext novella with a complex, noisy, rather ungainly and at times unattractive design. (I ought to point out I was a member of the selection committee that short listed entries for the Electronic Literature Organisation’s inaugural hypertext fiction prize in 2001, of which “These Waves of Girls” was the recipient.) There is a Flash credit sequence that doubles as a recurring navigational screen, tiled images, embedded frames, and 404’s which produce a carnivalesque parody of what constitutes good design, usability, and a good read.

Is it ‘bad’ design? Probably. Is it bad code? Definitely. Is the author a bad web designer, naïve, or in command and ironically gauche? Who can tell from the work, and more importantly, at what point does her intention become significant or dominant to the critical analysis of the work? It could be that she fired up her wysiwyg editor and wove away, or it could be that she carefully considered the errors as a montage of attractions and oppositions. My point is simply that the work doesn’t tell us, and it is the work that matters.

Recognising this I would argue the critic is much better placed to then critique the inadequacies of the project as realised, by providing a context for these that relates to the work itself, rather than an a priori set of conditions that it ought to meet. I am, for instance, reminded of many low budget independent films where available lighting, sync sound, and single takes are the rule, producing work that is, compared to Hollywood, ‘unprofessional’. (Or the entire tradition of using untrained actors, for example most of the oeuvre of Kenneth Loach.) Yet we have the vocabulary and the ability to contextualise and engage with this work, and recognise that Hollywood simply does not provide the terms with which to engage with the work critically. More over, like the dribbles of paint in Pollack, the best of such work embraces these constrained conditions as a positive event in or for the work – they are not films that secretly wish they had a Hollywood budget but creatively, aesthetically, critically and theoretically place themselves against such practices. To misjudge this leads to bad criticism an an inability to ‘hear’ the work.

When confronted with a work such as Fisher’s I’d argue a viable critical methodology is to ask of the work why it wants to look like a teenage girls bedroom – or it’s webbed equivalent. Or more literally, let’s think of the work as how a teenage girl might see herself, where the 404’s become something akin to that obviously enormous pimple on your nose on the morning of the prom, and the sound files scattered hither and thither remind you of the Spice Girls covers you secretly sung. Then you might develop an argument as to whether it is good or bad work, but only then.

Alternatively, Ian Haig’s “My Favourite babe: Aquatic technology” offers a similar problem. This web based new media work offers very little in the way of contextual cues as to whether it is ‘art’, ‘satire’, or a sad boy’s hypertext dream (unlike Fisher’s which at least was entered in an electronic literature competition!). Examining the source code reinforces this as it displays all the worse excesses of wysiwyg generated code – multiple empty embedded table cells, division elements and font tags. However, keeping in mind what I have suggested, a viable critical approach here is not to accept that it is bad code, bad design and so bad work, but to have the necessary vocabulary to contextualise the work, and to be able to ‘listen’ to it in such a way that it can at least be interpreted rather than merely judged – criticised rather than reviewed.

This begs the question of which elements in the work ought to be ‘listened’ to, though the answer is usually all. This includes interface, textual, graphic and media content, code, site architecture, and any other properties that you wish to draw into your critical analysis. As a discursive object all of these obviously convey intended meanings and are available for interpretation, and I would suggest that some process of interpretation is required before, rather than alongside, normative judegments of whether the particular work is good or bad.

A preliminary approach then might recognise the repeated excesses of the work, expressed in its language, graphic design, repetition, subject matter and of course the code. So, rather obviously, it is at some level a work about excess, and this excess extends ‘inwards’ into the very role of code and its relatiosnhip to its visible surface (a relation of latent to manifest texts if you like) and outwards into the textual and media economy of the web, popular culture, and into the figure of Pamela Anderson herself. Indeed, “My Favourite babe” uses what could be called ‘internet English’, a creole that I would imagine being the sort of English you would learn and use if the Internet (just as popular music, television, and film before it) was where you taught yourself how to read and write. Now this is not yet a critical analysis of Haig’s work, but already key tropes are apparent around the themes of repetition, excess, popular culture, and the slippage between appropriation, originality, and the creolisation of ‘content’ online.

As “My Favourite babe” suggests, badness is of course here a deliberate and courted aesthetic, so any judgement about the work must acknowledge the nested series of contexts this invovles – the work succeeds in its badness so is it a good work, or is it a poor example of this electronic creole antiaesthetic? The question, or problem, only makes critical sense once a critical context has been determined for and by the work.

Did Ian Haig intend this? I don’t know, and I don’t think it matters if the object is to provide a critical idiom for these works. You can only read against the grain when you know how to find the grain.

Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Trans. Stephen Heath. Image–Music–Text. London: Flamingo, 1977. 142–8.
Fisher, Caitlin. These Waves of Girls. February 22 2001. www. Available: http://www.york.ca/caitlin/waves/. September 24 2001.
Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977. 113-38.
Gadamer, Hans–Georg. Philosophical Hermeneutics. Trans. David E. Linge. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.
Haig, Ian. “My Favourite babe: Aquatic technology”. http://media-arts.rmit.edu.au:16080/Ian_Haig/babe/. 2002. August 22 2002.

La Descente

Robert Croma has a new video entry, La Descente. The project is not video blogging, they are more considered, formal, graceful and rare than that. Slow motion, a sea of people descending, I assume to the Metro (following earlier work from Paris), or the Tube (he is British), or perhaps we’re in New York. I can’t yet tell. It is the morning, well I imagine it is the morning simply because they look like they are on their way to work, not home (it is a descent, after all). Sort of Metropolis for 2010. Some notice the camera and watch as they walk, because of course you couldn’t pause here, not on the way to work and not within this slow sea of movement. It is perhaps, what, a quarter of the way through and my tension, pleasure, anxiety rises as I am waiting for something. Croma’s work regularly uses some postproduction digital effects to highlight, enframe and detail momentary and otherwise missed moments of quotidian elegance and grace. Is it that person, watching the camera and the video maker, is this the moment. No. It continues. I realise I have been wrong. That’s a student, this must be afternoon, no student leaves for university at the same time as the workers, and that tabloid so many have, I realise it’s the Evening Standard, so it is the afternoon, people heading home. So now I read their faces as tiredness, the fatigue not of what lies ahead, but of what has been. The day that was and the crush and rush of the ride home. And I notice the shopping bags, the small and large talismans bought back from the day in the city. Nothing happens, beyond the interminable crowds. Mums, dads, kids, people with phones, iPods, bags, prams, trolleys. It is poetic observation, sort of Renoir’s romantic realism with Vertov’s cyborg eye that lets us see what we can’t see (well, he didn’t call it that but that’s what he’d be up to today, wouldn’t he?).