Photoshoppin' Agin

Ah, the top is better. Yay, I did it!

END OF POST

The Library of Babel

A Borges story usually involves some sort of maze with overlaps of time and place. Adopting a garden of forking paths as a metaphor for hyperlinking or information retrieval means imagining the self in a time and a placewhere one must select a branch to follow. In the story, Borges situates international characters in a wartime setting in order to suggest the labyrinthine nature of narrative, time, and cultures--a maze, but not one without a map of sorts.

Like much of Borges's fiction, this story is self-aware, and its metafictional quality is like the metatextual nature of most (almost want to say "all") new media. In the story, a book can be infinite, and the shape Albert first imagines is circular, until he realizes that an infinite book has endlessly forking paths. These paths intersect and build on one another like Vannevar Bush's trails through the memex, pointing at the question of infinite storage addressed by Turing in his article on A. I.

These mazes and trails made me look again at the post I made last week on rhizomes because I was headed in this direction already when I commented on Murray, who refers to Deleuze and Guattani's metaphor of a rhizome as a way to understand new media structures. The forking paths are like forking roots in a plant's subterranean system. Stored information can be imagined as having the same structure.

In another story by Borges I once read, Borges imagines a library of Babel, in which people hope to contain the mysteries of humanity, but where there is too much information, to the point that nobody can make sense of it all, and where language itself collapses. The librarians are like high priests lording over books that are unreadable and useless.

This week the readings had me thinking about how the way we organize information affects public memory--which overlaps with my Photoshop Universe post. Does memory leave a trail? Can we have an infinite library in the Internet? Or are we left with a "library of Babel"?

END OF POST

Photoshop Universe

I was thinking about how Wysocki defines new media more broadly than Manovich and Murray, who define new media as more digital. In particular, I thought about how she says that new media texts cause us to look at all texts in a new way. New media, then, makes us read all texts with different patterns--literally, how the eyes move--and with different expectations.

Since its birth, photography has been used not to represent the exact world--"reality"--but to represent the world as the photographer sees it, wanted to see it, or wanted to project it. I'm thinking of how Mathew Brady's Civil War photographs were composed and how there was this collective intake of breath when people learned he had dragged the bodies around before taking pictures when the topic was on the news some years ago. It was nothing new to historians.

The issue forces us to confront how we construct reality and what we accept as reality. Here are a few related to Brady's work, but these could be about any photographed subject:

1. To what degree is public memory of the Civil War created by Brady's photographs?

2. Does how we construct our (civic, national, etc.) memory of the Civil War change when we know the photographs were arranged? (i.e., does it matter that he did it?)

3. How do these questions contribute to considering where art and history intersect?

Okay, it seems I'm wandering (wondering?) far from the "new media" topic, but I wanted to take a historical angle on photographic manipulation. It's another case of what I call "the past as it never was." Photography never did or could represent reality "perfectly."

So I need to bring this back around to Wysocki, who says new media causes us to look at all texts in a new way. Certainly, Photoshop causes us to question photographs--and I know I'm not saying something new or earth-shattering here, but learning how to use Photoshop has made me consider how much of what I see in photos has been retouched. (I used to think of Photoshop mostly of obvious montages, but Deke has opened my eyes to the world of improving the average.) The larger issue at work is how this changes our record of histories--personal, public, civic and national.

In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins* addresses the issue in a chapter called "Photoshop for Democracy." Regarding political activism and pop culture, he suggests that "crystallizing one's political perspectives into a photomontage that is intended for broader circulation is no less an act of citizenship than writing a letter to the editor of a local newspaper that may or may not actually print it. For a growing number of young Americans, images (or more precisely the combination of words and images) may represent as important a set of rhetorical resources as texts" (222).

*Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: NYU Press, 2006.

END OF POST

Better!

I know that the first time I tried this, I basically made it way more complicated than it needed to be!

END OF POST

Not a prizewinner!

Um, I think I need another date with Deke.

END OF POST

Rhizomes, braid, or mobius strip?

Addressing new media means creating new paradigms and reacting to existing paradigms. Janet Murray asserts that new media “braids” together engineering and humanistic perspectives to create an altogether new space fraught with anxieties and potentialities. Part of Murray’s definition of new media references Deleuze and Guattani’s metaphor of a rhizome (see p. 8-9) as a way to understand new media structures—hmmm, I would say architecture, but I might need a plant metaphor. I recalled seeing D & G’s rhizome concept in an article I recently read in PMLA by Ed Folsom, creator of the online Walt Whitman archive. In that article, Folsom considers archives as rhizomatic as he considers databases as a genre.

All this talk of branching roots and subterranean structures makes me think of questions raised in today’s readings, not just in Murray but in Manovich and Wysocki as well, though to a lesser degree there.

1. Does a new paradigm for understanding (digital) information more accurately reflect actual experience and human thought?

2. Does a rhizomatic structure preclude hierarchies in arrangement of ideas or categories?

3. How does shifting to rhizomatic paradigm disrupt linear narrative? How does this, in turn, change our understanding of research and of history? Do these things become non-linear or less linear? Is there ultimately some sort of disruption of chronology or new understanding of time happening here? (Okay, I’m going far here, but Manovich crosses into this area and sounds like he’s saying none of this is altogether new.)

4. Are these "braids" or rhizome infinite? Do new media structures allow us to represent knowledge as infinite?

All of these questions and the readings themselves keep circling the same questions about defining new media and how to situate it in terms of modernism and postmodernism, in particular. Manovich, for instance, looks at how we understand new media information as having an appearance of unity and a sum of its parts at the same time. Time, again.

I do have one problem with Manovich. He comes up with the idea of new media as metamedia and as the “encoding of the modernist avant-garde.” I see how he comes to a “new” avant-garde (and therefore to postmodernism), but Manovich doesn’t address one aspect of the avant-garde (of the 20s) that I do see as germane to new media—the idea of the role of the artist. (Murray dug into this a bit.) As I recall, the role of the artist in the avant-garde of the 20s created a space for the artist that was a break from society, with the artist in an adversarial relationship with those who don’t understand his/her art.

I don’t think that applies so much to new media, but it does leave me with a final question (and the desire to contradict myself)—Is the “new media artist” allowed more participation in society (even in democratic ideals) than the traditional avant-garde (whoa, the oxymoron) artist?

END OF POST

Welcome

Welcome. This blog grows from a new media class assignment as part of my final steps to being ABD. Is that like saying "almost almost" ready to work on my dissertation?

With the image here, I'd like to introduce my interest in American themes, however broad a topic that may be. It's a photo of the Tetons I took last summer, a view I love and return to often. For me, pictures like this speak rhetorical possibilities, revealing the relationship between American optimism, sweeping landscape vistas, power, nature, and nationalism.

I love how the clouds, the mountains, and the trees complement one another in movement and shape. The thing is, the shot was mostly luck, and that leaves me with something think about. How much of composition is serendipitous?

END OF POST