This post, and the ones to soon follow, will constitute a sort of paradigm shift for me, away from longer updates with long breaks in between, toward shorter and more frequent updates. I have realised that, save a few instances, the longer format I have been using so far was lacking both the depth of a full-fledged article; and the concise impact of... well, a blog post. From now on my aim will be to update quite more frequently, perhaps weekly, with shorter reaction pieces, reviews, critiques and nuggets of research as a way to inform in a more agile manner.
A few weeks ago, in the Facebook group for ICOM Veneto, a meaty document titled "Il Museo e la Rete: Nuovi Modi di Comunicare" was circulated; it constitutes, if not a first, at least the current state of the art in the formalized discussion of the Italian situation for what concerns museums and digital media. After a brief introduction to general themes and issues, the document (produced by Fondazione Fitzcarraldo, an independent consultancy) presents a lengthy selection of case studies from Italy and beyond.
One of the first questions everyone, including me, gets asked at a museum conference is usually a variation of 'why are you interested in museums?' A question that, perhaps unlike others, I usually find relatively easy to answer. Essentially, it is not museums that I am interested in, as they simply happen to be one of the privileged loci in which many of the dynamics I am actually interested in unfold: namely, the utopia drive and its connections to technocratism and the digital media; the articulation of ideologies through jargon and expression as employed in programmatic documents; the construction and conceptualisation of improvement and remediation. Before I settled on discussing the Smithsonian Institution's Wiki as a main case study, for part of my dissertation I mostly concentrated upon digital strategies as manifestos, exploring qualitatively (lacking the quantitative instruments) the ins and outs of the language they employed and how it, essentially, carris a certain technology-inflected ideology that is then translated into a worldview. A piece I spent various months on was, in fact, the Tate Online's Digital Strategy - in its various iterations, a document that "Il Museo e La Rete..." often refers back to as the state of the art in digital strategies.
This is certainly true in the sense that Fondazione Fitzcarraldo's document, in spite of not being produced by a museum institution, as it often happens with digital strategies, but rather constituting a more survey-like overview; still fully employs the rhetoric, paradigms and jargon that expresses, in the end, a certain understanding of the online digital context. Non necessarily an incorrect one, but surely one that cannot be merely accepted and must be critiqued throughout.
I find very significant that the very first topic that the book addresses is the seemingly eternal darling of technoutopia, Web 2.0. This iteration of the Web, which has been dismissed as marketing jargon by many including one of the Internet's very founders, is presented as a sort of technologically-powered watershed: it will 'open new scenarios' in which the role of the user will change from passive consumer to producer or prosumer (p.9), progressively giving life to a culture of convergence (p.12). As is typical for this kind of texts, the fulfilment of technology's promises is largely postponed into a visible yet out of reach future.Web 2.0 itself allows, empowers and opens avenues of possibilities for a future utopia of knowledge and participation, configuring a 'state of grace' that is ripe with promises - perhaps without a need to actually deliver at the level of such expectations. The Language employed emphasises transition from a state to another: everything seems to be 'on the way to' and 'becoming' without actually being there - puzzling, since the paradigm shifts described are well underway and, sometimes, on the way out (as in the case of the prosumer, who has become an established figure and has now largely been normalised and accepted into the fold of global capital).
It is then only logical that another big chunk of text is spent on enumerating the flaws on the current state of affairs, which is a particularly easy exercise in the italian context: this due both to national disposition, and the objectively laggish situation of the museum environment at a national level. The Fondazione Fitzcarraldo's document configures the present as a dire yet not hopeless necessary stage, the situation that needs to be both remediated and re-mediated; in both cases through technology. The need for re-mediation becomes all the more urgent when comparison with the Anglo-Saxon model, seen as more advanced and integrated, are evoked (p.54). The matter that interests me, in this case, is not if such perceptions are correct or otherwise (they are), but the kind of paradigm-scape they paint: one in which, in Italy but also abstractly everywhere, a renewed and humanising technology promises to create a better, utopian tomorrow from the difficulties of today. A move between eras - from the tradigital to the connected (p.29).
Humanising tetchnology has become a key strategy of contemporary global capital, of which museums are also an expression. Web 2.0 is a paramount example of such a strategy, considering how it rhetorically positions itself as the point in which the imagination, affect and 'humanity' of the person behind the screen can finally express itself meaningfully, breaking the machinic sheen of identity-less interaction and rendering the Internet a web of people instead of machines - producing wealth all the while. This idea and its affective potential are all employed throughout the text: it is mostly conceptualised as a passage from the 'reach... to the engage' (p.24), a stage of the museum-user interaction in which the latter is affectively 'hooked' and reeled in, by employing the affect-building affordances that Web 2.0 as a technology affords: humanisation and consequent reduction of the machine-man distance; interaction and the consequent (perhaps mostly fictional) empowerment of the user; investment by the user in the museum as a brand (a concept that comes across in the Fitzcarraldo report, as well as in Tate Online's, and many other digital strategies).
Overall, "Il Museo e La Rete" offers an interesting overview, and more than a few case studies, regarding possible strategies for digital engagement; but it does so by largely rehashing paradigms that have become, by now, fairly commonplace. The end result is a strategic document that, even when accounting for its survey-like intentions, remains fairly generic and presents us with statements that, while not particularly insightful, remain slippery enough that they are never outright wrong.
- Fondazione Fitzcarraldo. Il Museo e la Rete: Nuovi Modi di Comunicare (2014).
- Stack John. "Tate Digital Strategy 2013-2015: Digital as a Dimension of Everything" Tate Papers 19 (2013).
- Anderson, Nate. "Tim Berners-Lee on Web 2.0:" nobody even knows what it means" ArsTechnica (2006).
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Friday, November 7, 2014
Museums Alive! - Leicester, 4-5 November
I have just returned from the fantastic conference organised by the Museum Studies department at the University of Leicester, titled 'Museums Alive! - Exploring how museums behave like living beings'. It's the latest in a series of thematic conferences that have become somewhat of a regular yearly appointment for young and old museums practitioners alike (it is already in its sixth edition), and always offer a gamut of relevant and timely topics under the year's umbrella theme (see the title for hints). I have presented a snippet of my PhD research under the title 'Museums in the Organic Web', which seems to have been well received. Now that all is said and done, as a sort of 'welcome home' post I decided to write a few lines on the conference experience, highlighting some of the best ideas I have seen floating around and that merit some further thinking.
The conference, hosted in the beautiful Museum Studies buildings (a counterpoint to the not-so-beautiful Leicester), followed a special format this time around: aside the usual plenary sessions, half-hour presentations and workshops, it also featured the so called 'Rapid Fire' presentations: four young researchers (and I was one of them!) had only five minutes to communicate an idea, piece of research or question to the audience - we were timed, literally. A stressful but enjoyable experience, which remarked on brevity as the soul of wit (and clarity), and will hopefully be replicated next year, perhaps alongside other less seen models - the wide room we were in could have easily hosted a poster session, or artworks display.
These kinds of conferences, I have noticed, tend to attract mostly young academics and, consequently, naturally lend themselves to a kind of 'nimbleness' in tone and exchange that, at times, suffers from the necessary inclusion of heavier, more 'experienced' voices. While I surely enjoyed Susan Pearce's illustration of the many reasons for which museum professionals should be aware of advances in the neurological understanding of visual perception; or Simon Knell's survey of how museums thinking might have learned and still learn from the natural world; these kinds of longer sessions added little new or unheard to a conference that, being centered on young voices, made of its very novelty of thinking and approach its strong point. In the end, some of the sessiosn by expert academics ended up feeling uncomfortably akin to lectures, and I naturally gravitated toward snappier and more specific pieces of research that truly added something I had never heard of before.
A few highlights. Elena Tognoli's evocative video Yet Another Narrative is a multi-layered meditation that managed to approach with wit and imagination some of the big questions museums have to grapple today, such as the pervasive use of technology; and the relevance of the museum environment to personal experiences and life narratives. Alisa Maximova's 'Social organisation of experiments in museums' offered some very good hints on the kind of almost ethnological approach that we might assume, on the field, while researching user interaction with difficult and hard-to-understand science exhibits (though widely applicable also to artworks, minus all the touching...). Alex Woodall's amazing workshop Body, Mind and Spirit suffered from the typical academic reticence to engage in a healthy bit of insightful tomfoolery (which is to say, few among the public spoke and volunteered) but nonetheless constituted an occasion to do something our Wikipedia society rarely affords: discussing an object we knew nothing about. We even had a nice piece of interdisciplinarity, with criminology PhD candidate Jack Denham's presentation centered on some aspects of true crime museums' display of a glamourised and film-like vision of violence and crime.
I was expecting lots from Museums Alive! and I was not disappointed. My hope is that the strong points that have come to the surface in this year's 'experiments' will be further exploited in the conferences to come, playing even more on what oung researchers and alternative delivery channels have to offer. You can see the live Tweeting of the conference here.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Google Art Project and the Technocratic Approach
In spite of a good chunk of my doctoral research being about one of the latest ventures of Google into the delivery of digital content, Google Art Project, only very recently I have gotten around to reading what is perhaps the most popular academic account of Google and its ideology, Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Googlization of Everything (University of California Press, 2011). The text is, by the standards of research on the digital, by now history - and it barely misses the February 2011 release of Google Art Project's first iteration, which therefore is not discussed in it.
Since there are plenty of reviews and commentary available three years after the fact, I will limit myself to very few general comments, before digging into the one idea that I found relevant about Vaidyanathan's account of Google's rise and hegemony. One aspect that troubled me about the author's discussion is the extreme dependence on 'what ifs'. A large chunk of the (not necessarily unjustified) wariness toward Google and its services seems to be motivated not by factual happenings which unveil Google as malevolent, incompetent or financially unsound; rather, whole chapters of cautionary warnings are predicated on the possibility that, at some point in the future, hypothetical paradigm shifts might lead Google to betraying, perhaps unwillingly, our trust. In this sense, the main truss of the author's rationale for caution ends up being based around possibilist and overall pessimist 'what if' scenarios, so vague and broad in their configuring they can scarcely claim any prescient value. Additionally, all along we run into the implicit assumption that some paradigms will simply always be, and there is no acknowledgement that, for example, Google might be a new kind of financial or cultural entity symptomatic of a paradigm shift, and therefore not be subject entirely to the dynamics that have marked the rise and fall of corporations so far. Overall, Google is discussed as politically being just another instance of the same old thing, institutionally speaking, a point that I and I'm sure some others would contend with.
Once one finishes reading the book, and with the foresight of 2014, Vaidhyanathan's caveats begin to ring somewhat hollow and needlessly conservative, in particular when absurdly pitting against each other online and offline cultural institutions, and of course siding with the latter in spite of stating not to be doing so. A final chapter, vaguely configuring an alternative world-embracing 'human knowledge library' of sorts, is a piece of utopian fluff that irritates more than fascinate, not unlike for example the final chapter of David Harvey's otherwise seminal Spaces of Hope (2000).
There is however one point, actually not new to Vaidhyanathan, which is still certainly relevant within and beyond Google itself. In the book's introduction, he remarks on the tendency, among policymakers, to adopt a technocratic stance toward the resolution of emerging issues: referring to Google, he states that 'the company itself takes a technocratic approach to any larger ethical and social question in its way" (p.8). This is not exclusive to Google, just as this kind of commentary is not exclusive to Vaidhyanathan: Nicholas Carr famously touched on Google's technocratic approach in 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' in 2008 (a thecnocratic solution to the profoundly social issue of cultural literacy) and technocracy is a main subject of Richard Coyne's Technoromanticism (1999), itself building on Stéphan Barron's work on the transformative power of technologies. This all feeds, eventually, into utopian studies and the idea of an ideally perfectible society through technology (assuming, as it seems to be, that all utopias are to a large extent technological).
Vaidhyanathan's chastising of Google as technocratic spans the whole company. Although most of the book concentrates on in -depth discussions of the legal, political and social implications of Google Maps and Google Books, his general argument implies that, in accordance with a contemporary global trends, all of Google ventures have a technocratic, or techno-remedial element to them: a social or cultural shortcoming (that can be monetised) is seen, and a technocentric solution is devised, with the underlying assumption that the trasformative power of technology will be enough to remediate the issue (mapping the world with Street View will make the world accessible at one's fingertips; scanning millions of books will create a global repository of culture) (For more on the parochially remedial power of technology see also Gregg, 2010).
My question is, then, does this hold true for Google Art Project as well? After all, intuitively Google's partnership with museums would seem to be an altogether different beast than the highly monetised, advertisement - driven Google activities Vaidhyanathan acquaints us with - mining user searches for revenue, de facto selling advertising space on Google Maps through hotel booking and restaurant advertisement. Google Art Project even present itself as a not-for-profit enterprise, under the banner of the Google Cultural Institute.
Thinking along these lines is, however, misleading. One of the characteristics of contemporary, global capitalism is the way in which it manages to absorb all life and activity, including that which does not directly produce revenue. The creation of experiences, affectivity and impressions of selfless generosity allows for the penetration of a brand (in this case Google) within the fabric of everyday life, eventually enhancing attitudes toward revenue-producing services. In the end, not-for-profit activities produce actual profit by shaping user's attitudes toward the brand and, eventually, its other products.
Google Art Project has been, since the very start, a key tool in Google's crusade to uphold its PR motto, 'don't be evil'. As part of the Google Cultural Institute, Google Art Project is in a privileged position to present itself as a selfless agent of cultural amelioration working for the common good. In this sense, the stereotypically apolitical, non-partisan 'power of art' to unite and amaze is channeled as a means to lessen the perceived 'evilness' of the very political and partisan decisions that, as a corporation, Google has to take on a daily basis.
The invested channeling of the universally ameliorative powers of art is attained not only through Google Art Project's intentions, but also through the technological means by which art is deployed on Google's platform. As mentioned above, the 'technocratic approach' implies that, once a social, cultural or political problem is identified (in our case, improving Google's image; improving access to art on a global basis; improving the perception of museums on a global scale), a solution is devised that is rooted on a technological advance, which moves from the neutrality of the technical to the realm of the ethically charged - it enters cultural, society and politics.
While not the only one, the first technological remediation that Google proposes through the Google Art Project is the 'gigapixel view', where users can employ a digital drag-and-drop interface to explore in great detail works of art photographed from the collections of participating institutions. Viewers can 'dive into brush-stroke level detail' by zooming into the image, reaching levels of magnification that are usually not accessible not even in the physical museum context: in this sense, the digital platform that Google offers, in its gigapixel iteration, can be interpreted as implicitly resolving what could be perceived as the main issue that stands between the viewer and the true appreciation of art in the physical context - that is, other people. The fact that one can tag and share artworks does not lessen the perception that, if interpreted as alternative rather than integrative to museums, Google Art Project constitutes a setback from the current museal trend toward participation, community and sharing.
There is also the matter of interpretation. For art to be 'accessible' it needs to be understood as well as experienced: if there is one lesson to be taken from the various art upheavals of the latter 20th century, is that art cannot be divorced at any level from the history and ideology in which it was conceived and executed. Google's platform, however, does not offer neither the content, nor the affordances that lend to any kind of actual learning, interpretation, or interfacing with the artwork aside from gazing and surface manipulation: there is no interpretation given, nor the space for imprinting upon the experience the user's own. Google Art Project perhaps technologically remediates our perception, but not our understanding of art.
In spite of these shortcomings, these difficulties that the technocratic approach does not resolve or instead exacerbates, Google Art Project seems to have been a relatively successful tool in improving Google's corporate image: with a few exceptions the platform was very well received by both public and professionals, further indicated by the number of artworks shared by users. Perhaps a stronger collaboration with the institutional counterpart - in this case, museums - than it has been the case in Google Books or Google Street View has been a deciding factor. However, there might also be another, not unrelated but different reason behind the success of Google Art Project in improving Google's corporate image: the convergence of the perceived remedial power of technology, and the socially ameliorative power of art ('public' art, to be intended in the wider meaning of the word) generates a powerfully affective combination that is likely able to resolve any issue that should arise from 'corporate evilness', giving the impression of cultural and social responsibility that Vaidhyanathan diagnosed as lacking from Google corporation. Only time will tell if the company's technocratic approach to art will eventually be successful in posing Google as a truly invested cultural player.
- Gregg, Melissa. "Available in selected metros only: Rural melancholy and the promise of online connectivity." Cultural Studies Review 16.1 (2010): 155.- Harvey, David. Spaces of hope. Vol. 7. Univ of California Press, 2000.- Sood, Amit. "Explore Museums and Great Works of Art in the Google Art Project" Official Google Blog (2011).
- Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of everything:(and why we should worry). Univ of California Press, 2012.
Since there are plenty of reviews and commentary available three years after the fact, I will limit myself to very few general comments, before digging into the one idea that I found relevant about Vaidyanathan's account of Google's rise and hegemony. One aspect that troubled me about the author's discussion is the extreme dependence on 'what ifs'. A large chunk of the (not necessarily unjustified) wariness toward Google and its services seems to be motivated not by factual happenings which unveil Google as malevolent, incompetent or financially unsound; rather, whole chapters of cautionary warnings are predicated on the possibility that, at some point in the future, hypothetical paradigm shifts might lead Google to betraying, perhaps unwillingly, our trust. In this sense, the main truss of the author's rationale for caution ends up being based around possibilist and overall pessimist 'what if' scenarios, so vague and broad in their configuring they can scarcely claim any prescient value. Additionally, all along we run into the implicit assumption that some paradigms will simply always be, and there is no acknowledgement that, for example, Google might be a new kind of financial or cultural entity symptomatic of a paradigm shift, and therefore not be subject entirely to the dynamics that have marked the rise and fall of corporations so far. Overall, Google is discussed as politically being just another instance of the same old thing, institutionally speaking, a point that I and I'm sure some others would contend with.
Once one finishes reading the book, and with the foresight of 2014, Vaidhyanathan's caveats begin to ring somewhat hollow and needlessly conservative, in particular when absurdly pitting against each other online and offline cultural institutions, and of course siding with the latter in spite of stating not to be doing so. A final chapter, vaguely configuring an alternative world-embracing 'human knowledge library' of sorts, is a piece of utopian fluff that irritates more than fascinate, not unlike for example the final chapter of David Harvey's otherwise seminal Spaces of Hope (2000).
There is however one point, actually not new to Vaidhyanathan, which is still certainly relevant within and beyond Google itself. In the book's introduction, he remarks on the tendency, among policymakers, to adopt a technocratic stance toward the resolution of emerging issues: referring to Google, he states that 'the company itself takes a technocratic approach to any larger ethical and social question in its way" (p.8). This is not exclusive to Google, just as this kind of commentary is not exclusive to Vaidhyanathan: Nicholas Carr famously touched on Google's technocratic approach in 'Is Google Making Us Stupid' in 2008 (a thecnocratic solution to the profoundly social issue of cultural literacy) and technocracy is a main subject of Richard Coyne's Technoromanticism (1999), itself building on Stéphan Barron's work on the transformative power of technologies. This all feeds, eventually, into utopian studies and the idea of an ideally perfectible society through technology (assuming, as it seems to be, that all utopias are to a large extent technological).
Vaidhyanathan's chastising of Google as technocratic spans the whole company. Although most of the book concentrates on in -depth discussions of the legal, political and social implications of Google Maps and Google Books, his general argument implies that, in accordance with a contemporary global trends, all of Google ventures have a technocratic, or techno-remedial element to them: a social or cultural shortcoming (that can be monetised) is seen, and a technocentric solution is devised, with the underlying assumption that the trasformative power of technology will be enough to remediate the issue (mapping the world with Street View will make the world accessible at one's fingertips; scanning millions of books will create a global repository of culture) (For more on the parochially remedial power of technology see also Gregg, 2010).
My question is, then, does this hold true for Google Art Project as well? After all, intuitively Google's partnership with museums would seem to be an altogether different beast than the highly monetised, advertisement - driven Google activities Vaidhyanathan acquaints us with - mining user searches for revenue, de facto selling advertising space on Google Maps through hotel booking and restaurant advertisement. Google Art Project even present itself as a not-for-profit enterprise, under the banner of the Google Cultural Institute.
Thinking along these lines is, however, misleading. One of the characteristics of contemporary, global capitalism is the way in which it manages to absorb all life and activity, including that which does not directly produce revenue. The creation of experiences, affectivity and impressions of selfless generosity allows for the penetration of a brand (in this case Google) within the fabric of everyday life, eventually enhancing attitudes toward revenue-producing services. In the end, not-for-profit activities produce actual profit by shaping user's attitudes toward the brand and, eventually, its other products.
Google Art Project has been, since the very start, a key tool in Google's crusade to uphold its PR motto, 'don't be evil'. As part of the Google Cultural Institute, Google Art Project is in a privileged position to present itself as a selfless agent of cultural amelioration working for the common good. In this sense, the stereotypically apolitical, non-partisan 'power of art' to unite and amaze is channeled as a means to lessen the perceived 'evilness' of the very political and partisan decisions that, as a corporation, Google has to take on a daily basis.
The invested channeling of the universally ameliorative powers of art is attained not only through Google Art Project's intentions, but also through the technological means by which art is deployed on Google's platform. As mentioned above, the 'technocratic approach' implies that, once a social, cultural or political problem is identified (in our case, improving Google's image; improving access to art on a global basis; improving the perception of museums on a global scale), a solution is devised that is rooted on a technological advance, which moves from the neutrality of the technical to the realm of the ethically charged - it enters cultural, society and politics.
While not the only one, the first technological remediation that Google proposes through the Google Art Project is the 'gigapixel view', where users can employ a digital drag-and-drop interface to explore in great detail works of art photographed from the collections of participating institutions. Viewers can 'dive into brush-stroke level detail' by zooming into the image, reaching levels of magnification that are usually not accessible not even in the physical museum context: in this sense, the digital platform that Google offers, in its gigapixel iteration, can be interpreted as implicitly resolving what could be perceived as the main issue that stands between the viewer and the true appreciation of art in the physical context - that is, other people. The fact that one can tag and share artworks does not lessen the perception that, if interpreted as alternative rather than integrative to museums, Google Art Project constitutes a setback from the current museal trend toward participation, community and sharing.
There is also the matter of interpretation. For art to be 'accessible' it needs to be understood as well as experienced: if there is one lesson to be taken from the various art upheavals of the latter 20th century, is that art cannot be divorced at any level from the history and ideology in which it was conceived and executed. Google's platform, however, does not offer neither the content, nor the affordances that lend to any kind of actual learning, interpretation, or interfacing with the artwork aside from gazing and surface manipulation: there is no interpretation given, nor the space for imprinting upon the experience the user's own. Google Art Project perhaps technologically remediates our perception, but not our understanding of art.
In spite of these shortcomings, these difficulties that the technocratic approach does not resolve or instead exacerbates, Google Art Project seems to have been a relatively successful tool in improving Google's corporate image: with a few exceptions the platform was very well received by both public and professionals, further indicated by the number of artworks shared by users. Perhaps a stronger collaboration with the institutional counterpart - in this case, museums - than it has been the case in Google Books or Google Street View has been a deciding factor. However, there might also be another, not unrelated but different reason behind the success of Google Art Project in improving Google's corporate image: the convergence of the perceived remedial power of technology, and the socially ameliorative power of art ('public' art, to be intended in the wider meaning of the word) generates a powerfully affective combination that is likely able to resolve any issue that should arise from 'corporate evilness', giving the impression of cultural and social responsibility that Vaidhyanathan diagnosed as lacking from Google corporation. Only time will tell if the company's technocratic approach to art will eventually be successful in posing Google as a truly invested cultural player.
- Carr, Nicholas. "Is Google making us stupid?." Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education 107.2 (2008): 89-94.
- Coyne, Richard. Technoromanticism: digital narrative, holism, and the romance of the real. MIT Press, 2001.- Gregg, Melissa. "Available in selected metros only: Rural melancholy and the promise of online connectivity." Cultural Studies Review 16.1 (2010): 155.- Harvey, David. Spaces of hope. Vol. 7. Univ of California Press, 2000.- Sood, Amit. "Explore Museums and Great Works of Art in the Google Art Project" Official Google Blog (2011).
- Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of everything:(and why we should worry). Univ of California Press, 2012.
Saturday, August 2, 2014
Google art Project's Affective Interface
Even if you have never thought of your own research in the context of affect studies, and even if you have never heard of affect studies themselves, it is very likely that your research still includes affect, perhaps unknowingly, as one of its facets. I realised that about my own research when I managed to read The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (2010). This edited volume seeks to render in a more nuanced manner the complexities of that burgeoning field of research that is 'affect studies': which is to say (and, as the volume's contributors would agree, any definition is bound to remain incomplete and provisional) the ways in which those elusive, formless, life-exceeding relationships that are usually termed 'affect' make their way into both everyday and global practice.
The volume does much in the way of unhinging 'affect' as a technical term from whatever parlance bound baggage it might have: most of the volume's contributions, in spite of the authors' call toward higher consideration of the specificities of affects, are rather theoretical in scope, exploring definitions and boundaries of affect from a sociological perspective: essays such as Anna Gibbs' “After Affect. Sympathy, Sinchronicity and Mimetic Communication”, Patricia Clough's “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies”, or Lauren Berlant's “Cruel Optimism” establish firm ground with regards to its philosophical genealogy, its political belonging, and overall well define what competes to the 'affect rubric'. All these essays make occasional use of examples, yet only one section of the book, three chapters in all, specifically addresses affect as it interfaces with one specific, circumscribed context: specifically mental health services, office workplace and teaching in primary schools. The relative greater attention that the volume pays to the 'big picture' is not necessarily a mismanagement of focus, at all; yet, the more I dived through extensive swathes of Foucault, Spinoza and Deleuze, I felt more and more compelled to take up the challenge laid down by Nigel Thrift: the 'analysis of specific forms of affect as a means of investigating particular political-cum-cultural situations (p. 289).
The question was, hadn't I already touched upon affect in my doctoral research? If affect is, as Seigworth and Gregg suggest, a 'bloom space' of forces and relations that exist in the relationship between agents (2013, pp. 2 -5); and, as according to Thrift, increasingly technologically mediated and having to do with the relationship between animate and inanimate (2013), this was certainly the case.
Part of my doctoral research focused on a reconceptualisation of certain digital visual artefacts, which I termed, following the lead of Joohan Kim (2001), 'digital beings'. My underlying assumption was that even in a digital context the 'linguistic turn', marked by an assumption that the visual was a second hand copy of an already discounted item, as it functioned only as a 'window' into a discursive argument, gradually lost ground to the 'visual' or, rather', 'sensuous' turn: an increased attention toward aspects of the object that could not be reduced to discourse, but sat instead at the stage of the sensuous encounter with an object – which, consequently, gained a new significance as no longer merely a copy of an image to be semiotically read, but as an object of perceptive encounter in and for itself, a 'digital being'.
Then the question becomes, what are some specific examples of digital beings? what kind of encounter, metaphorical and literal, is actually possible between digital beings and human beings? In my dissertation work I chose to focus on what was, back then, the new thing in the displaying of art online: The Google Art Project. For the very few, probably none who have had no experience with Google's venture partnership with museums around the world, here is the quick and dirty summary: the Google Cultural Institute obtains from museums the rights to display on a proprietary platform 7.000 megapixel reproductions of choice artworks, usually well known pieces the public is well acquainted with. These digital reproduction can then be explored to a level of magnification previously unthinkable: each stroke of the brush can be seen in its full glory, often to the point where magnification makes the mimetic aspect of the artwork disappear from perception, turning masterpieces into swirls of colour (i.e. Seraut Grand Jatte). Barring some notable detractors, such as James Elkins, Google Art Project has received nearly universal acclaim as a novel, entertaining and meaningful way to explore significant works of art from all over the world.
What does Google Art Project have to do with affect? One aspect of Google's platform that I was very interested in was its user interface. In general, it is through the interface's level of interaction and manipulability that a digital item becomes a digital being proper: an 'ecosystem' (Manovich, 2013, p.331) is created through the different pieces and functions of the interface, and the ways in which they allow an ever-changing array of performances and relationships between human and non-human to form.
One first step is to identify some typologies of such performances and relationships, before we examine them qualitatively and observe them in their affective valence. One of the difficulties in describing a digital interface is the reality that, by the time you think you have described it, it likely will have undergone a new iteration. This is very much the case with Google Art Project (a case that forced me to write almost a whole dissertation chapter halfway through). Google Art Project's user interface and overall look is designed by Schematic, a WPP Digital company, and does not follow the predominantly white, stripped-down 'Google template' established by the company's search engine, mail service, or scholarly articles portal. Upon opening the front page http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/ in Google Chrome, we are presented with a gigapixel reproduction of a randomly chosen artwork, for example Carl Hofverberg's Trompe L'Oeil (1737).
Most of the screen around the reproduction is occupied by a patterned light grey field, which acts as a sort of virtual workspace. Two darker bands occupy the extreme top and bottom: the top band houses links and drop-down menus for navigating 'collections', 'artists', 'artworks' and 'user galleries'; a link to the 'street view' mode; the search engine and the login link. The bottom bar houses legal terms, language selection (18 languages available as of now), FAQs and a lighter grey 'Featured' tab, which slides down the main workspace to offer a selection of three featured artworks from the pool. In more recent updates, most likely in order to emphasise the expanding scope (geographically and culturally) of the project, another scrolling band partially superimposed to the image field has been added: it displays recent additions, a link to new collections available for exploration. While all images can be magnified to a certain degree, only select 'gigapixel' reproductions can be explored through Google Art Project's special magnifying interface, which has seen a degree of re-iteration over time
By dragging with the cursor, the gigapixel reproduction can be moved around the workspace, as well as beyond the frame of the browser's window. In a previous iteration of the platform, the gigapixel image could be explored through a sort of 'magnifying glass': by dragging this square section of the interface across the reproduction, as one would do with an actual magnifying glass, one can enlarge specific sections of the reproduction itself against the smaller whole. More recently, gigapixel reproductions can be explored by manipulating a thumbnail, superimposed to the workspace: in this case, the magnified section comes to occupy most of the workspace, while it is the thumbnail that remains static. This last interface iteration is, arguably, more in line with other well-established interfaces for the observation and manipulation of images in a digital environment as it recalls, for example, 'explore' tools used by many photomanipulation programs, a kind of convergence of the kind Manovich (2013) discussed perhaps.
What kind of sensuous encounter, what kind of interfacing and interacting does Google Art Project's gigapixel interface encourage? I am not solely talking about 'interaction' from the social point of view, as in the sharing of information among users of the platform; rather, I will focus on the qualitative moment of the singular encounter between the human and the nonhuman, as mediated by the interface's affordances. A very interesting aspect of both versions of Google Art Project's interface, and the first version in particular, is the relative shift away from traditional visuality, the disembodied and 'machinic' quality of vision (Johnston, 1999), through a peculiar and very sensuous interpenetration of touch, haptics and proprioception (with technological limitations, of course). Close inspection of the artwork to the level where gigapixel technology becomes relevant, which is to say the greatly magnified, renders necessary moving either a smaller version of the frame, or the frame itself through usage of a peripheral (a mouse, a keyboard) or touch itself (in the case of a tablet). Unlike a traditional (one could say, standard) museum experience where, aside from the quickly receding ambience, we 'look at' works of art with a gaze that is, essentially, disembodied; in the case of Google Art Project's gigapixel magnification the user is forced to act haptically on the image, which becomes an artefact of sensual interaction well beyond the distanced act of gazing: the user is encouraged, in fact required to manipulate haptically the technological surface that encapsulates the image which, in this context, through interface becomes an actor itself: it lets itself be negotiated by the user through the sensuous affordances of the interface.
Does this sensuous experience, however, imply the presence of affect? Overall I would argue so, and I think the missing link lies in the concept of 'public intimacy' laid out by Thrift (2013). Traditionally, going to privileged places for art viewing, including but not limited to museums and galleries, is an eminently public activity, in many cases a public performance: going on a tour of big museum names is historically an ostentation of wordliness, and rarely if ever one gets to see art one on one – artworks are hung on the pretence that they are, barring few exceptions, for everyone to see. While the images provided on Google Art Project are also, essentially, 'hung' in the sense that they are available to everyone with an internet connection, intuitively the experience one goes through is marked by privacy over publicness: we experience the artwork one-on-one, with the added problem that what we are looking at is, in the end, merely a copy. What we are looking at is not 'the real thing', which is eminently public and cannot be experienced on an intimate level (art inspired solipsist raptures aside): this private viewing seems, therefore, to be on a different and lower level than the publicly acknowledged act of looking at art in a physically public context.
This equation is put in need of re-evaluation, on a double level, once platforms such as Google Art Project come into play. First of all, much like Pinterest or, in some instances, Flickr, Google Art Project's social media apparatus makes the act of privately viewing art on a screen public in a very Web 2.0 sense: users can tag, create and share collections for others to see. In this first case there is a shift from intimacy to the public, but it seems to me that the latter supersedes the former, rather than integrate and enhance it; and, while performativity and sociality play a part, affect is not what this kind of public intimacy is ultimately about.
A more interesting way of understanding Thrift's public intimacy in the context of Google Art Project is by taking into question the kind of relationship that, as the mutual agents user / digital being meet, is formed by and informs a sort of prototypically formless, diffused affectivity that is, most of all, sensuous flow and aesthetic engagement as mediated by interfaces. Within this relationship between human and non-human, affect comes to the fore where the public object, displayed for all to see yet distant from everyone involved, comes 'closer' to the user, through magnification of an imaginable order, and turns intimate in a way art has - for many - never been. Exploring a gigapixel work on Google Art Project offers a radically flow inducing, 'hands-on' tactile and proprioceptical experience that, while materially different from the real artwork (but then again, how many get the chance to touch a statue in a museum?), philosophically offers an affective flow, engagement and overall aesthetic experience (in the broadest sense of the word) that simply cannot be conveyed if we erroneously assume that all the user does is looking at magnified art on a screen.
This affect-laden, intimate relationship with art has many implication of a cultural, social, economic and political nature. First of all, in spite of the ever raging debate about what online display might mean for museum attendance figures (comments to Proctor, 2011), it seems likely that Google Art Project and similar would rather enhance the user's interest in art and artworks: the intangible, diffused affective flow created between human and nonhuman through the digital interface reinforces, in the end, the status of the artwork, the copy and its once removed original, as iconic and auratic products of genius worthy of being digitally repurposed and reproposed, over and over. The distance between us and the artwork closes in, and we come to love them anew.
Another problem then emerges: even if we establish these digital reproductions as 'digital beings' which are not merely machinically gazed copies, but objects of a measure of bodily affect, how do we relate their intrinsic 'value' compared to the physical artwork? Do they have a life of their own, or they function as valuable reminders of what we could be seeing instead, in a museum? After all, even a copy of a painting that we hang on a wall and brings us joy is, in the end, indexical to the 'real thing'. This problem is not easily resolved, as it verges on the assumption that the affect generated by a copy possesses a philosophically intrinsic value that stands even when examined aside from the digital being's referentiality. Surely an aspect that needs to be explored more thoroughl
Another interesting facet of bringing affect into the Google Art Project equation is the sociological one, with all of its political implications – after all, according to Thrift (2013), affect in the contemporary context is a strong motivator toward consumption of the material and the symbolic kind, the latter applying very well to the kinds of affect that projects such as Google's leverage. The topic would (and will) merit its own post, however we could introduce the issue by observing how well the philosophy behind Google Art Project fits the Web 2.0 paradigm that Google itself is, in a measure, predicated upon: the participatory paradigm (Simon 2010) – or, in a less politically innocent manner, the 'prosumer' ideology (Toffler, 1980). While Google Art Project might seem, at first, a quintessential 'top to bottom' Web 1.0 project, where packaged content is delivered as-is from big names onto consumers, reality is more nuanced. On one level there are obvious markers: users can pin and share collections through the platform, generating therefore a participatory pseudo-community similar to those on Pinterest and other 'curatorial' social media. Also, more subtly, the publicly intimate affect that the user comes to feel with the once distant work of art introduces a culturally participatory element, albeit a potential and somewhat passive one: best case scenario is that the user comes to feel a new investment into a widely shared global culture, creating new potential networks of appreciation and de facto 'participating' into culture.
Accepting this point depends, of course, on what we qualify as participation, and remains open to arguments of Google Art Project as an avenue for reeling in approval and visitors into participating museums, and social legitimacy into Google the company. There is no doubt that the affectivity generated toward a certain cultural and social canon of what constitutes great art and, consequently, great culture offers all kinds of legitimising power to institutions that, in the end, are in it for the money and for the glory. In a future post I will look closer at the economical and political implications of Google Art Project's affective flow, within the contest of contemporary capital's symbolic production.
Elkins, James. “Is Google bringin us too close to art?” DailyDot (2011).
Google Art Project http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project?hl=it
Google Cultural Institute https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/home?hl=it
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The affect theory reader. Duke University Press, 2010.
Johnston, John. "Machinic vision." Critical Inquiry (1999): 27-48.
Kim, Joohan. "Phenomenology of digital-being." Human Studies 24.1-2 (2001): 87-111.
Manovich, Lev. Software takes command. Vol. 5. A&C Black, 2013.
Proctor, Nancy. “Google Art Project: a new generation of museums on the web”. Curator Journal (2011).
Simon, Nina. The participatory museum. Museum 2.0, 2010.
Toffler, Alvin. The third wave. New York: Bantam books, 1981.
The volume does much in the way of unhinging 'affect' as a technical term from whatever parlance bound baggage it might have: most of the volume's contributions, in spite of the authors' call toward higher consideration of the specificities of affects, are rather theoretical in scope, exploring definitions and boundaries of affect from a sociological perspective: essays such as Anna Gibbs' “After Affect. Sympathy, Sinchronicity and Mimetic Communication”, Patricia Clough's “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies”, or Lauren Berlant's “Cruel Optimism” establish firm ground with regards to its philosophical genealogy, its political belonging, and overall well define what competes to the 'affect rubric'. All these essays make occasional use of examples, yet only one section of the book, three chapters in all, specifically addresses affect as it interfaces with one specific, circumscribed context: specifically mental health services, office workplace and teaching in primary schools. The relative greater attention that the volume pays to the 'big picture' is not necessarily a mismanagement of focus, at all; yet, the more I dived through extensive swathes of Foucault, Spinoza and Deleuze, I felt more and more compelled to take up the challenge laid down by Nigel Thrift: the 'analysis of specific forms of affect as a means of investigating particular political-cum-cultural situations (p. 289).
The question was, hadn't I already touched upon affect in my doctoral research? If affect is, as Seigworth and Gregg suggest, a 'bloom space' of forces and relations that exist in the relationship between agents (2013, pp. 2 -5); and, as according to Thrift, increasingly technologically mediated and having to do with the relationship between animate and inanimate (2013), this was certainly the case.
Part of my doctoral research focused on a reconceptualisation of certain digital visual artefacts, which I termed, following the lead of Joohan Kim (2001), 'digital beings'. My underlying assumption was that even in a digital context the 'linguistic turn', marked by an assumption that the visual was a second hand copy of an already discounted item, as it functioned only as a 'window' into a discursive argument, gradually lost ground to the 'visual' or, rather', 'sensuous' turn: an increased attention toward aspects of the object that could not be reduced to discourse, but sat instead at the stage of the sensuous encounter with an object – which, consequently, gained a new significance as no longer merely a copy of an image to be semiotically read, but as an object of perceptive encounter in and for itself, a 'digital being'.
Then the question becomes, what are some specific examples of digital beings? what kind of encounter, metaphorical and literal, is actually possible between digital beings and human beings? In my dissertation work I chose to focus on what was, back then, the new thing in the displaying of art online: The Google Art Project. For the very few, probably none who have had no experience with Google's venture partnership with museums around the world, here is the quick and dirty summary: the Google Cultural Institute obtains from museums the rights to display on a proprietary platform 7.000 megapixel reproductions of choice artworks, usually well known pieces the public is well acquainted with. These digital reproduction can then be explored to a level of magnification previously unthinkable: each stroke of the brush can be seen in its full glory, often to the point where magnification makes the mimetic aspect of the artwork disappear from perception, turning masterpieces into swirls of colour (i.e. Seraut Grand Jatte). Barring some notable detractors, such as James Elkins, Google Art Project has received nearly universal acclaim as a novel, entertaining and meaningful way to explore significant works of art from all over the world.
What does Google Art Project have to do with affect? One aspect of Google's platform that I was very interested in was its user interface. In general, it is through the interface's level of interaction and manipulability that a digital item becomes a digital being proper: an 'ecosystem' (Manovich, 2013, p.331) is created through the different pieces and functions of the interface, and the ways in which they allow an ever-changing array of performances and relationships between human and non-human to form.
One first step is to identify some typologies of such performances and relationships, before we examine them qualitatively and observe them in their affective valence. One of the difficulties in describing a digital interface is the reality that, by the time you think you have described it, it likely will have undergone a new iteration. This is very much the case with Google Art Project (a case that forced me to write almost a whole dissertation chapter halfway through). Google Art Project's user interface and overall look is designed by Schematic, a WPP Digital company, and does not follow the predominantly white, stripped-down 'Google template' established by the company's search engine, mail service, or scholarly articles portal. Upon opening the front page http://www.googleartproject.com/en-gb/ in Google Chrome, we are presented with a gigapixel reproduction of a randomly chosen artwork, for example Carl Hofverberg's Trompe L'Oeil (1737).
Most of the screen around the reproduction is occupied by a patterned light grey field, which acts as a sort of virtual workspace. Two darker bands occupy the extreme top and bottom: the top band houses links and drop-down menus for navigating 'collections', 'artists', 'artworks' and 'user galleries'; a link to the 'street view' mode; the search engine and the login link. The bottom bar houses legal terms, language selection (18 languages available as of now), FAQs and a lighter grey 'Featured' tab, which slides down the main workspace to offer a selection of three featured artworks from the pool. In more recent updates, most likely in order to emphasise the expanding scope (geographically and culturally) of the project, another scrolling band partially superimposed to the image field has been added: it displays recent additions, a link to new collections available for exploration. While all images can be magnified to a certain degree, only select 'gigapixel' reproductions can be explored through Google Art Project's special magnifying interface, which has seen a degree of re-iteration over time
By dragging with the cursor, the gigapixel reproduction can be moved around the workspace, as well as beyond the frame of the browser's window. In a previous iteration of the platform, the gigapixel image could be explored through a sort of 'magnifying glass': by dragging this square section of the interface across the reproduction, as one would do with an actual magnifying glass, one can enlarge specific sections of the reproduction itself against the smaller whole. More recently, gigapixel reproductions can be explored by manipulating a thumbnail, superimposed to the workspace: in this case, the magnified section comes to occupy most of the workspace, while it is the thumbnail that remains static. This last interface iteration is, arguably, more in line with other well-established interfaces for the observation and manipulation of images in a digital environment as it recalls, for example, 'explore' tools used by many photomanipulation programs, a kind of convergence of the kind Manovich (2013) discussed perhaps.
What kind of sensuous encounter, what kind of interfacing and interacting does Google Art Project's gigapixel interface encourage? I am not solely talking about 'interaction' from the social point of view, as in the sharing of information among users of the platform; rather, I will focus on the qualitative moment of the singular encounter between the human and the nonhuman, as mediated by the interface's affordances. A very interesting aspect of both versions of Google Art Project's interface, and the first version in particular, is the relative shift away from traditional visuality, the disembodied and 'machinic' quality of vision (Johnston, 1999), through a peculiar and very sensuous interpenetration of touch, haptics and proprioception (with technological limitations, of course). Close inspection of the artwork to the level where gigapixel technology becomes relevant, which is to say the greatly magnified, renders necessary moving either a smaller version of the frame, or the frame itself through usage of a peripheral (a mouse, a keyboard) or touch itself (in the case of a tablet). Unlike a traditional (one could say, standard) museum experience where, aside from the quickly receding ambience, we 'look at' works of art with a gaze that is, essentially, disembodied; in the case of Google Art Project's gigapixel magnification the user is forced to act haptically on the image, which becomes an artefact of sensual interaction well beyond the distanced act of gazing: the user is encouraged, in fact required to manipulate haptically the technological surface that encapsulates the image which, in this context, through interface becomes an actor itself: it lets itself be negotiated by the user through the sensuous affordances of the interface.
Does this sensuous experience, however, imply the presence of affect? Overall I would argue so, and I think the missing link lies in the concept of 'public intimacy' laid out by Thrift (2013). Traditionally, going to privileged places for art viewing, including but not limited to museums and galleries, is an eminently public activity, in many cases a public performance: going on a tour of big museum names is historically an ostentation of wordliness, and rarely if ever one gets to see art one on one – artworks are hung on the pretence that they are, barring few exceptions, for everyone to see. While the images provided on Google Art Project are also, essentially, 'hung' in the sense that they are available to everyone with an internet connection, intuitively the experience one goes through is marked by privacy over publicness: we experience the artwork one-on-one, with the added problem that what we are looking at is, in the end, merely a copy. What we are looking at is not 'the real thing', which is eminently public and cannot be experienced on an intimate level (art inspired solipsist raptures aside): this private viewing seems, therefore, to be on a different and lower level than the publicly acknowledged act of looking at art in a physically public context.
This equation is put in need of re-evaluation, on a double level, once platforms such as Google Art Project come into play. First of all, much like Pinterest or, in some instances, Flickr, Google Art Project's social media apparatus makes the act of privately viewing art on a screen public in a very Web 2.0 sense: users can tag, create and share collections for others to see. In this first case there is a shift from intimacy to the public, but it seems to me that the latter supersedes the former, rather than integrate and enhance it; and, while performativity and sociality play a part, affect is not what this kind of public intimacy is ultimately about.
A more interesting way of understanding Thrift's public intimacy in the context of Google Art Project is by taking into question the kind of relationship that, as the mutual agents user / digital being meet, is formed by and informs a sort of prototypically formless, diffused affectivity that is, most of all, sensuous flow and aesthetic engagement as mediated by interfaces. Within this relationship between human and non-human, affect comes to the fore where the public object, displayed for all to see yet distant from everyone involved, comes 'closer' to the user, through magnification of an imaginable order, and turns intimate in a way art has - for many - never been. Exploring a gigapixel work on Google Art Project offers a radically flow inducing, 'hands-on' tactile and proprioceptical experience that, while materially different from the real artwork (but then again, how many get the chance to touch a statue in a museum?), philosophically offers an affective flow, engagement and overall aesthetic experience (in the broadest sense of the word) that simply cannot be conveyed if we erroneously assume that all the user does is looking at magnified art on a screen.
This affect-laden, intimate relationship with art has many implication of a cultural, social, economic and political nature. First of all, in spite of the ever raging debate about what online display might mean for museum attendance figures (comments to Proctor, 2011), it seems likely that Google Art Project and similar would rather enhance the user's interest in art and artworks: the intangible, diffused affective flow created between human and nonhuman through the digital interface reinforces, in the end, the status of the artwork, the copy and its once removed original, as iconic and auratic products of genius worthy of being digitally repurposed and reproposed, over and over. The distance between us and the artwork closes in, and we come to love them anew.
Another problem then emerges: even if we establish these digital reproductions as 'digital beings' which are not merely machinically gazed copies, but objects of a measure of bodily affect, how do we relate their intrinsic 'value' compared to the physical artwork? Do they have a life of their own, or they function as valuable reminders of what we could be seeing instead, in a museum? After all, even a copy of a painting that we hang on a wall and brings us joy is, in the end, indexical to the 'real thing'. This problem is not easily resolved, as it verges on the assumption that the affect generated by a copy possesses a philosophically intrinsic value that stands even when examined aside from the digital being's referentiality. Surely an aspect that needs to be explored more thoroughl
Another interesting facet of bringing affect into the Google Art Project equation is the sociological one, with all of its political implications – after all, according to Thrift (2013), affect in the contemporary context is a strong motivator toward consumption of the material and the symbolic kind, the latter applying very well to the kinds of affect that projects such as Google's leverage. The topic would (and will) merit its own post, however we could introduce the issue by observing how well the philosophy behind Google Art Project fits the Web 2.0 paradigm that Google itself is, in a measure, predicated upon: the participatory paradigm (Simon 2010) – or, in a less politically innocent manner, the 'prosumer' ideology (Toffler, 1980). While Google Art Project might seem, at first, a quintessential 'top to bottom' Web 1.0 project, where packaged content is delivered as-is from big names onto consumers, reality is more nuanced. On one level there are obvious markers: users can pin and share collections through the platform, generating therefore a participatory pseudo-community similar to those on Pinterest and other 'curatorial' social media. Also, more subtly, the publicly intimate affect that the user comes to feel with the once distant work of art introduces a culturally participatory element, albeit a potential and somewhat passive one: best case scenario is that the user comes to feel a new investment into a widely shared global culture, creating new potential networks of appreciation and de facto 'participating' into culture.
Accepting this point depends, of course, on what we qualify as participation, and remains open to arguments of Google Art Project as an avenue for reeling in approval and visitors into participating museums, and social legitimacy into Google the company. There is no doubt that the affectivity generated toward a certain cultural and social canon of what constitutes great art and, consequently, great culture offers all kinds of legitimising power to institutions that, in the end, are in it for the money and for the glory. In a future post I will look closer at the economical and political implications of Google Art Project's affective flow, within the contest of contemporary capital's symbolic production.
Elkins, James. “Is Google bringin us too close to art?” DailyDot (2011).
Google Art Project http://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/project/art-project?hl=it
Google Cultural Institute https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/home?hl=it
Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The affect theory reader. Duke University Press, 2010.
Johnston, John. "Machinic vision." Critical Inquiry (1999): 27-48.
Kim, Joohan. "Phenomenology of digital-being." Human Studies 24.1-2 (2001): 87-111.
Manovich, Lev. Software takes command. Vol. 5. A&C Black, 2013.
Proctor, Nancy. “Google Art Project: a new generation of museums on the web”. Curator Journal (2011).
Simon, Nina. The participatory museum. Museum 2.0, 2010.
Toffler, Alvin. The third wave. New York: Bantam books, 1981.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Piccolo Spazio Pubblicità
While waiting for a long form post to come in the next couple of days, a little Storify link of a presentation I recently did in Bologna. Mostly a reminder that museology is alive and well in Italy, and that I could stand to lose a couple of kilos.
Also, I will be giving a short presentation at the University of Leicester's Museum Alive! conference on the 5th of November.
Also, I will be giving a short presentation at the University of Leicester's Museum Alive! conference on the 5th of November.
Sunday, July 6, 2014
Un-monumentality
*Disclaimer* This blog post does not hold pretense of presenting complete, well-formed research. I retain the right to make far-fetched connections, experiment with ideas, and make as much or as little sense as my academic conscience allows. Reader be warned...
A few days ago, while browsing my feed on academia.edu, I stumbled on a 2008 paper by Sean Lowry of the University of Newcastle, Australia, titled "Monuments to Heroic Failure". The paper, by now somewhat dated yet exceedingly relevant in its analysis, is a theoretical discussion of a, I would argue, still-current trend within the contemporary arts: the embrace of failure, fragility and un-monumentality as antidote to the apparent inescapability of postmodern irony, and as tools for resisting commodification within the monumental structures of contemporary capitalism. As I read more and more of the paper, both the strengths and the ambiguities of Lowry's arguments got me thinking about two apparently quite different, yet I believe somewhat entwined questions: does escaping monumentality really mean escaping spectacle, or is there also within the capitalist cultural machine a turn toward un-monumentality, fragility and 'straightforwardness' as an alternative to the growing unmarketability of irony? and then, how has the museum responded to the possible receding of monumentality and spectacle, and how does it negotiate the cultural shift, both within capital and resistances to it, away from 'scale, duration, sometime political sanctimony and immersive theatricality' (Lowry, 2008, p.199)? These two questions are not entirely unrelated: as the museum becomes more and more a tout-court cultural agent that operates at all levels, the matter of how it interacts with, and reacts to, wider ideological shift becomes not only interesting and explorable, but also politically pressing.
Lowry makes a compelling argument for the emergence, in the latter half of the 2000s' first decade, of a new tendency in contemporary art (chiefly sculpture, installation and performance art) that ruptures with postmodernity's tradition of ironic detachment by resorting to abject, fragile un-monumentality, both formally and discursively, as a new discursive strategy. Citing mostly Sydney-based artists, Lowry argues that for many contemporary practitioners, the automatic defaulting of cultural production into the postmodern theatrical categories of 'allegory, metaphor and irony' has become a 'cul-de-sac' (Lowry, 2008, 199), a prison that needs to be renegotiated and, ultimately, escaped if one is to generate a culture that stands not in antithesis, but as alternative to the global spectacle of capitalism. The return to humble assemblages of detritus, lesser and amorphous forms, willing to speak to the viewer at face value (or as close as possible to it) is the preferred strategy of these artists: after all, as the word 'spectacle' itself suggests, it is the shiny monumentality of its theatrical apparatus that makes the spectacle of global capital so enticing and deceptive, and this also comes to be the smooth surface that a possible alternative to the spectacle has to pierce in order to generate a sustainable alternative discourse. Lowry does not specifically address the economic motivations that might underpin this ' un-monumental turn' in artistic practice: yet, from the advantageous position of 2014, we can see that the global economic downturn - and its, ableit temporary, exposè of global capital's bankrupcy - shows the far sightedness of artists that turned to the abject, the fragile, and the unomnumental in order to antagonise the spectacular.
Biljana Jancic, I'll Be Your Mirror, 2012. The Lock-Up Cultural Centre
Lowry also does not explicitly come out and tell us if we are to interpret this new 'abject' turn as successful in escaping commodification within the spectacle, even though this seems to be the logical conclusion we are to draw from the essay: if, as Lowry suggests, this art manages to rupture the spectacle of art itself, it stands as logical that its performance should be all the more successful in its intent to 'present the fragmented detritus of late capitalism with a flaccid middle finger' (Lowry, 2008, 200).
Yet, moving beyond the artistic examples presented by Lowry and the art world proper, can we be sure that the capitalist spectacle cannot accomodate and deploy the same kind of fragility, un.monumentality and humble abjection that should, in theory, destabilise it? in fact, hasn't the pointed end of capitalism already moved beyond the slippery silicon faces of Hollywood starlets, arming itself instead with the 'radical honesty' that seems to be the hallmark of post-postmodernity, altermodernity etc.?
In Italy, Cielo TV has been airing for a few weeks an ad for the upcoming 2014 season of talent show X-Factor. In the ad an homely and unassuming girl, working a shift in a bar by the seaside, listens through ear buds while singing a cappella pop idol P!nk's hit single Try. Unaware of colleagues and passers-by eavesdropping, she sings her way to X-Factor's stage, where she performs the remainder of the song together with winners from past editions.
While the first part of the video is rather standard reality TV fare, it is the first segment that is, formally, most interesting. This section is striking for its unassuming nature, understated aesthetics, lack of monumentality and simple, metaphorically 'fragile' characters. Most of the shots are taken from awkward angles and possess the kind of 'shaky' quality one would associate with handheld cameras; the visual tones are muted and approach grayscale; the singing is low- key, lacks in virtuosity (as well as English fluency) and possesses the everyday, unspectacular quality of humming under the shower, or while working.
The fact that, by the end, the video's narrative resolves into monumentality and full-blown spectacle of the most pernicious kind (the collective delusion of stardom and subsequent acceptance) should not distract us from acknowledging that the instruments that got the singer (and us) there are eminently un-monumental. This is not a capitulation of the global spectacle, but merely its ingenuous restyling: the lesson of Web 2.0's grass roots, collectively participatory model has been thoroughly digested, and once again capitalist spectacle finds a way to turn anti-capital's weapons to its own favour. There is a literal and a metaphorical narrative throughout the video: just as the girl goes from humming amateurishly to singing in front of a crowd among big names, the un-monumentality and the 'fragility' of everyday experience, the same kind of non star-laden abjection that 'normal people' share becomes not an antithesis to spectacle, but one way by which we can find our place within spectacle itself. In this sense, the unabashedly un-theatricality of a YouTube amateur video, akin to the bricoleur-like means of the artists mentioned by Lowry, morphs into one more of the virtually infinite avenues that capital and spectacle can exercise in order to usurp agency and enforce normative biopower from above.
In the end, the kind of aesthetics, practices and paradigms that Lowry's examples succesfully deploy within the confines of the art market seems to lose most of their efficacy were they to be adopted by culture at large: the aesthetics of Occupy and Anonymous' visual paraphernalia, Youtube blogs and the 'new sincerity' (Pallasvuo, 2011) can be, and often are exploited by spectacle for its own replication.
In many ways, I also work within what could be considered, from the perspective laid above, a theatrical and spectacular 'monument'. As the many contemporary 'grand tours' of Europe and beyond's museum capitals testify, not to mention the architectural aspect, the museum has built much of its modern history upon spectacle, theatricality (physical and metaphorical), and a sense of imposing monumentality, of the historical and cultural kind. This seems to be true both in the case of the grandiose public museum of the 18th - 19th centuries, and its various Wunderkammern predecessors.
credit: kan_khampanya
This is, of course, an image of itself that the museum has worked hard to shed in recent decades. Spurred by New Museology, the emergence of science centres, and the constructivist museum (Hein, 1995), the contemporary museum seems to embrace more and more a sense of small scale, localised agency; an un-monumentality that is both material (smaller buildings housing collections as specific as hammers) and intellectual (exhibits of crowdsourced artifacts of lost love, for example), shifiting importance from the self assertive, authoritative and metaphorically 'smooth' front toward its inner workings (and inclusion of visitors in it), its contingent agency and its own limitations as an institution. In other words, it seems to me that the contemporary museum, at least in some cases, has followed somewhat the path that Lowry has laid out for the arts: a move away from monumentality, grandiosity and theatrical spectacle, toward a homely kind of resistance to the previous. And, just as in the case of art, it remains to be seen if the 'un-monumental museum' will be strategically successful in fending off the danger of museum as capitalist spectacle.
I have not yet addressed irony, which is a whole another problem with regard to the museum, traditionally the most un-ironic of places. This has, of course, changed recently, but I reserve the topic for a soon-to-be-coming post...
A few days ago, while browsing my feed on academia.edu, I stumbled on a 2008 paper by Sean Lowry of the University of Newcastle, Australia, titled "Monuments to Heroic Failure". The paper, by now somewhat dated yet exceedingly relevant in its analysis, is a theoretical discussion of a, I would argue, still-current trend within the contemporary arts: the embrace of failure, fragility and un-monumentality as antidote to the apparent inescapability of postmodern irony, and as tools for resisting commodification within the monumental structures of contemporary capitalism. As I read more and more of the paper, both the strengths and the ambiguities of Lowry's arguments got me thinking about two apparently quite different, yet I believe somewhat entwined questions: does escaping monumentality really mean escaping spectacle, or is there also within the capitalist cultural machine a turn toward un-monumentality, fragility and 'straightforwardness' as an alternative to the growing unmarketability of irony? and then, how has the museum responded to the possible receding of monumentality and spectacle, and how does it negotiate the cultural shift, both within capital and resistances to it, away from 'scale, duration, sometime political sanctimony and immersive theatricality' (Lowry, 2008, p.199)? These two questions are not entirely unrelated: as the museum becomes more and more a tout-court cultural agent that operates at all levels, the matter of how it interacts with, and reacts to, wider ideological shift becomes not only interesting and explorable, but also politically pressing.
Lowry makes a compelling argument for the emergence, in the latter half of the 2000s' first decade, of a new tendency in contemporary art (chiefly sculpture, installation and performance art) that ruptures with postmodernity's tradition of ironic detachment by resorting to abject, fragile un-monumentality, both formally and discursively, as a new discursive strategy. Citing mostly Sydney-based artists, Lowry argues that for many contemporary practitioners, the automatic defaulting of cultural production into the postmodern theatrical categories of 'allegory, metaphor and irony' has become a 'cul-de-sac' (Lowry, 2008, 199), a prison that needs to be renegotiated and, ultimately, escaped if one is to generate a culture that stands not in antithesis, but as alternative to the global spectacle of capitalism. The return to humble assemblages of detritus, lesser and amorphous forms, willing to speak to the viewer at face value (or as close as possible to it) is the preferred strategy of these artists: after all, as the word 'spectacle' itself suggests, it is the shiny monumentality of its theatrical apparatus that makes the spectacle of global capital so enticing and deceptive, and this also comes to be the smooth surface that a possible alternative to the spectacle has to pierce in order to generate a sustainable alternative discourse. Lowry does not specifically address the economic motivations that might underpin this ' un-monumental turn' in artistic practice: yet, from the advantageous position of 2014, we can see that the global economic downturn - and its, ableit temporary, exposè of global capital's bankrupcy - shows the far sightedness of artists that turned to the abject, the fragile, and the unomnumental in order to antagonise the spectacular.
Biljana Jancic, I'll Be Your Mirror, 2012. The Lock-Up Cultural Centre
Lowry also does not explicitly come out and tell us if we are to interpret this new 'abject' turn as successful in escaping commodification within the spectacle, even though this seems to be the logical conclusion we are to draw from the essay: if, as Lowry suggests, this art manages to rupture the spectacle of art itself, it stands as logical that its performance should be all the more successful in its intent to 'present the fragmented detritus of late capitalism with a flaccid middle finger' (Lowry, 2008, 200).
Yet, moving beyond the artistic examples presented by Lowry and the art world proper, can we be sure that the capitalist spectacle cannot accomodate and deploy the same kind of fragility, un.monumentality and humble abjection that should, in theory, destabilise it? in fact, hasn't the pointed end of capitalism already moved beyond the slippery silicon faces of Hollywood starlets, arming itself instead with the 'radical honesty' that seems to be the hallmark of post-postmodernity, altermodernity etc.?
In Italy, Cielo TV has been airing for a few weeks an ad for the upcoming 2014 season of talent show X-Factor. In the ad an homely and unassuming girl, working a shift in a bar by the seaside, listens through ear buds while singing a cappella pop idol P!nk's hit single Try. Unaware of colleagues and passers-by eavesdropping, she sings her way to X-Factor's stage, where she performs the remainder of the song together with winners from past editions.
While the first part of the video is rather standard reality TV fare, it is the first segment that is, formally, most interesting. This section is striking for its unassuming nature, understated aesthetics, lack of monumentality and simple, metaphorically 'fragile' characters. Most of the shots are taken from awkward angles and possess the kind of 'shaky' quality one would associate with handheld cameras; the visual tones are muted and approach grayscale; the singing is low- key, lacks in virtuosity (as well as English fluency) and possesses the everyday, unspectacular quality of humming under the shower, or while working.
The fact that, by the end, the video's narrative resolves into monumentality and full-blown spectacle of the most pernicious kind (the collective delusion of stardom and subsequent acceptance) should not distract us from acknowledging that the instruments that got the singer (and us) there are eminently un-monumental. This is not a capitulation of the global spectacle, but merely its ingenuous restyling: the lesson of Web 2.0's grass roots, collectively participatory model has been thoroughly digested, and once again capitalist spectacle finds a way to turn anti-capital's weapons to its own favour. There is a literal and a metaphorical narrative throughout the video: just as the girl goes from humming amateurishly to singing in front of a crowd among big names, the un-monumentality and the 'fragility' of everyday experience, the same kind of non star-laden abjection that 'normal people' share becomes not an antithesis to spectacle, but one way by which we can find our place within spectacle itself. In this sense, the unabashedly un-theatricality of a YouTube amateur video, akin to the bricoleur-like means of the artists mentioned by Lowry, morphs into one more of the virtually infinite avenues that capital and spectacle can exercise in order to usurp agency and enforce normative biopower from above.
In the end, the kind of aesthetics, practices and paradigms that Lowry's examples succesfully deploy within the confines of the art market seems to lose most of their efficacy were they to be adopted by culture at large: the aesthetics of Occupy and Anonymous' visual paraphernalia, Youtube blogs and the 'new sincerity' (Pallasvuo, 2011) can be, and often are exploited by spectacle for its own replication.
In many ways, I also work within what could be considered, from the perspective laid above, a theatrical and spectacular 'monument'. As the many contemporary 'grand tours' of Europe and beyond's museum capitals testify, not to mention the architectural aspect, the museum has built much of its modern history upon spectacle, theatricality (physical and metaphorical), and a sense of imposing monumentality, of the historical and cultural kind. This seems to be true both in the case of the grandiose public museum of the 18th - 19th centuries, and its various Wunderkammern predecessors.
This is, of course, an image of itself that the museum has worked hard to shed in recent decades. Spurred by New Museology, the emergence of science centres, and the constructivist museum (Hein, 1995), the contemporary museum seems to embrace more and more a sense of small scale, localised agency; an un-monumentality that is both material (smaller buildings housing collections as specific as hammers) and intellectual (exhibits of crowdsourced artifacts of lost love, for example), shifiting importance from the self assertive, authoritative and metaphorically 'smooth' front toward its inner workings (and inclusion of visitors in it), its contingent agency and its own limitations as an institution. In other words, it seems to me that the contemporary museum, at least in some cases, has followed somewhat the path that Lowry has laid out for the arts: a move away from monumentality, grandiosity and theatrical spectacle, toward a homely kind of resistance to the previous. And, just as in the case of art, it remains to be seen if the 'un-monumental museum' will be strategically successful in fending off the danger of museum as capitalist spectacle.
I have not yet addressed irony, which is a whole another problem with regard to the museum, traditionally the most un-ironic of places. This has, of course, changed recently, but I reserve the topic for a soon-to-be-coming post...
Hein, George E. "The constructivist museum." The educational role of the museum (1999): 73-79.
Lowry, Sean. "Monuments to Heroic Failure Broadsheet." Contemporary Visual Art+ Culture (The Contemporary Art Center of South Australia) 37.3 (2008).
Pallasvuo, Jakko. "New Sincerity." http://www.jaakkopallasvuo.com/newsincerity/
Wednesday, June 11, 2014
ICOFOM 2014
The annual ICOFOM symposium, where I have presented a slice of my recently concluded doctoral research ('Crowdsourcing as Playful Labour'), has concluded in Paris a couple of days ago. Being my first international conference in museology it proved to be an extremely enriching experience, in spite of quite a few hiccups mostly due to the inherent structure of the conference itself.
Structured in plenary one-hour presentations in the morning and shorter, 20-minute presentation workshops in the afternoon, the conference was carried out mostly in the French language, in spite of the majority of the audience understanding and speaking more than fluently English. While I do recognise that ICOFOM includes French as one of its official languages, the choice to privilege it, surely due to the conference location, caused more than one mishap when conjugated with valiant, but less than professional level translation services: most of the conferences, especially the plenaries, ended up being completely lost on non French-speakers, and a few heads were scratched when presenters in French answered questions in perfect English! The only logic conclusion is that the preponderance of presentations in French was politically motivated: hopefully the following conferences, perhaps led on more neutral ground, will turn the abundance and variety of languages spoken by ICOFOM members into an advantage rather than a hindrance.
The plenary conferences, while showcasing some very big names in museology (again, especially French), suffered from widespread 'angry intellectual syndrome': many presenters, given the echo chamber of ICOFOM, displayed the tendency to deviate from lucid and systematic presenting, descending into less than pacate rants on extremely generic topics - usually the degeneration of museums into lunaparks, or an irate defences of French New Museology against the Anglosaxon usurpers. This was more marked in those presentations that lacked any kind of visual support, a grave lack at an international conference: it is simply impossible to follow a hour-long speech without any kind of visual anchor.
The afternoon sections, smaller and more intimate, proved to be overall more engaging and, being thematically themed, perhaps more relevant to the specific interests of their audiences, integrating the very general - often generic - themes of the morning plenaries. I have followed mostly those tied to the 'Museum Ethics in the 21st Century' and 'The Participatory Museum': overall excellent reviews of the state of the art in museum-audience interactions and relationship, although I think safe to say that such state of the art continues along the well-established paradigms of the constructivist and educational museum, with little new under the sun. Among the more interesting presentations: Nicole Moolhuijsen on Old Masters and museum participation; Lydie Delahaye on the categories of museology; and Lynara Dovydaityte on the contested participatory museum.
Overall, the conference has been a great occasion for networking and getting to know the museological crowd, with which I deal only occasionally; and a good chance to get exposed to the dominant discourse among professionals. We can only hope, however, that we will see soon an ideological breakthrough - next year perhaps!
Soon to follow will be a post detailing my reactions to some of the presentations, which I will get to work on once such material is made available online (as the ICOFOM organisers encouraged us to). The conference's program is avaliable here.
Structured in plenary one-hour presentations in the morning and shorter, 20-minute presentation workshops in the afternoon, the conference was carried out mostly in the French language, in spite of the majority of the audience understanding and speaking more than fluently English. While I do recognise that ICOFOM includes French as one of its official languages, the choice to privilege it, surely due to the conference location, caused more than one mishap when conjugated with valiant, but less than professional level translation services: most of the conferences, especially the plenaries, ended up being completely lost on non French-speakers, and a few heads were scratched when presenters in French answered questions in perfect English! The only logic conclusion is that the preponderance of presentations in French was politically motivated: hopefully the following conferences, perhaps led on more neutral ground, will turn the abundance and variety of languages spoken by ICOFOM members into an advantage rather than a hindrance.
The plenary conferences, while showcasing some very big names in museology (again, especially French), suffered from widespread 'angry intellectual syndrome': many presenters, given the echo chamber of ICOFOM, displayed the tendency to deviate from lucid and systematic presenting, descending into less than pacate rants on extremely generic topics - usually the degeneration of museums into lunaparks, or an irate defences of French New Museology against the Anglosaxon usurpers. This was more marked in those presentations that lacked any kind of visual support, a grave lack at an international conference: it is simply impossible to follow a hour-long speech without any kind of visual anchor.
The afternoon sections, smaller and more intimate, proved to be overall more engaging and, being thematically themed, perhaps more relevant to the specific interests of their audiences, integrating the very general - often generic - themes of the morning plenaries. I have followed mostly those tied to the 'Museum Ethics in the 21st Century' and 'The Participatory Museum': overall excellent reviews of the state of the art in museum-audience interactions and relationship, although I think safe to say that such state of the art continues along the well-established paradigms of the constructivist and educational museum, with little new under the sun. Among the more interesting presentations: Nicole Moolhuijsen on Old Masters and museum participation; Lydie Delahaye on the categories of museology; and Lynara Dovydaityte on the contested participatory museum.
Overall, the conference has been a great occasion for networking and getting to know the museological crowd, with which I deal only occasionally; and a good chance to get exposed to the dominant discourse among professionals. We can only hope, however, that we will see soon an ideological breakthrough - next year perhaps!
Soon to follow will be a post detailing my reactions to some of the presentations, which I will get to work on once such material is made available online (as the ICOFOM organisers encouraged us to). The conference's program is avaliable here.
Sunday, May 25, 2014
Offtopic - 'A future without language: Blame!'
The first of many off-topic articles to follow, mostly stuff that couldn't find a home somewhere else. If you're here for museums, feel free to skip.
Hundreds, maybe thousands of years into mankind's bleak future, a wandering scientist's assistance is required by a tribe of born-again foragers: she has to help them decipher a set of cryptic hieroglyphs adorning a sealed door. These mysterious markings, the scientist reveals, merely identify the door as an emergency entrance into a dormant industrial complex: she can easily follow the instructions, open the door, and gain the group access into the structure. The quick deciphering job, so arcane and shaman-like to the foragers as to leave them speechless, would hold little mystique to most readers of this page from sci-fi manga Blame! (1998, Buramu!), as the mysterious markings were common, grade-school level kanji. Yet, within the story, written language is of little use unless strictly necessary to daily life: as the foragers readily admit, 'that's something from long, long ago'i.
Language, be it written or spoken, conceived as a medium or as an agent per se, has been a privileged site for cultural analysis, in particular since postmodern discourse theory staged the importance of language and words as generators of reality at all levelsii. Even following the waning of the postmodern paradigm at the turn of the millennium, language and words remain a crucial point for cultural studies, literary studies, and countless other disciplines: virtually all aspects of human culture have been explored according to their use of language and communication, both mimetically and structurally.
One item of human culture where analysis of language has paid dividends is the literary genre of science fiction. A host of scholars (pioneers Walter Meyers and Myra Barnes above all) have thoroughly investigated the importance that language, as a both a familiarizing and destabilizing agent, holds in giving shape to humanity's fictional vision of possible futures – from the rather straightforward and often implicit acknowledgment that, for example, an alien race might speak Klingon or Na'vi, to more complex use of language as a character or a plot point within the story (I'm thinking, for example, of George Orwell's Newspeak in 1984, or D'ni in the Myst video game franchise)iiiivv. Starr Friedman has strikingly characterized language in science fiction as a 'familiar alien': an agent that can either bring a vision of the future closer to us, or conversely distance us from immersion, encouraging critical reading usually of the social or political varietyvi. This is particularly true when the 'possible world' presented to us is of a kind that is particularly alien to us, in value if not in likelyhood: dystopian and anti-utopian fictions very often resort to language as a crucial device, in order to defamiliarize the ultimately undesirable alternative universe they present, unsettling the viewer and breaking the mimetic flow in order to hopefully engender critiquevii.
It seems to me that there have been, in spite of abundant research, two limits to current discourses on the importance of language in dystopic science fiction, and science fiction in general. On one hand, critiques of language in dystopian fiction concentrate intensely on a few select case study, which have become somewhat iconic: among them, Orwell's 1984, Huxley's Brave New World, and Hoban's Riddley Walkerviii. Exploration of the same topic in other media, outside the Western canon, have been sporadic at best and, more often than not, just as canon oriented: within Japanese studies, names that appear with clockwork regularity are Otomo's Akira, Shirow's Ghost in the Shell, and Gainax's Neon Genesis Evangelionix. If, however, we listen to convincing literature that poses dystopian science fiction manga (and anime) as a substantial genre that is not occasionally, but universally engaged in negotiation of contemporary Japan's many cultural anxieties (among them, destructive capitalism, bubble economy and the 1990s 'lost generation) it stands to reason that the same degree of analysis can be applied successfully to Japanese media, including lesser known textsxxi.
Additionally, nearly all research concentrates on 'language rich' works: which is to say, text that prominently and explicitly feature language as an agent, within the story and on a structural level. Much less attention has been paid to (admittedly, less frequent) works that intentionally minimize or suppress the role of language as a mimetic, or a structural device; texts that make of the scarcity of language a critical point. While it is perfectly understandable that scholarship should concentrate where an issue emerges forcefully and frequently, at times it is the very dearth of a crucial element, such as communication, that makes a strong ideological point.
In this article I will briefly look at the anti utopian, science fiction manga Blame!, written and illustrated by Nihei Tsutomu from 1998 to 2003. Firmly positioned outside the established canon of science fiction manga, this work is mostly well known for its striking scarcity of dialogue which, for the whole run of the series, takes a backseat to painstakingly rendered architectural backgrounds, rendered even more forcefully thanks to Nihei's distinctive dark, tortuous lines.
Superficial lack of dialogue is, however, merely the most immediate result of the highly destabilizing use of language that Nihei makes throughout Blame!, a work in which speech and written word feature more clearly than ever as Friedman's 'familiar aliens'xii. This manga, upon close scrutiny, configures a possible future, markedly dark and anti utopian, in which language as a constituent force of reality and discourse has thoroughly disintegrated: mimetically as a plot point within the story; structurally, as an element of manga as a text; metaphorically, as in the case of the 'visual language' of architecture. Thanks to these features, Blame! offers a destabilizing vision of our future, radically bleak unlike that of most dystopic science fictions, both within and without manga. I will discuss the 'anti utopian' role of language in Blame! from three, distinct but entwined perspective. First, I will briefly look at the visual and structural aspect, focusing on the role of architecture and landscape in relation to action and characters; then, I will examine the breakdown of the linguistic in the construction of relationships between different characters in the unfolding of the story; finally, I will focus on Blame!'s protagonist, Killy, as an example of the future, dystopic 'subject without language' that Nihei proposes as a possible posthuman subject.
Architecture Without Signs
One could argue that, far more than the barely sketched characters or the generic quest that drives the plot, it is the architecture, the landscape that raises to the status of real protagonist of Blame!xiii. Characters, aside from the protagonist, are scarce and sketched at best, but the organic conglomeration of structures and buildings that makes up 'the City', Nihei's visionary Dyson Sphere-like future Earth, is omnipresent: it is not rare to encounter entire pages consisting of nothing but architectural background, the protagonist reduced to an insignificant visual footnote tucked into a corner.
These omnipresent architectural landscape is also characterized by its database-like repetitiveness, its utter lack of a 'here' and a 'there', and its poverty of the visual/linguistic cues we associate with our current urban environment: for all one could gather, Killy might as well have walked in circles for the manga's ten volumes, wandering a deserted cityscape that has lost all meaningful signage. If the landscape is, as I would argue, a veritable character in Blame!, as an agent it radically breaks with the metaphorically 'inscribed body' of Foucaultian memory: in spite of its labyrinthine qualities, its layered construction, and its immediate (perhaps even too obvious) psychoanalytical values, it exists as something of a discoursiveless absolute, outside of discourse and outside of historicity (even a fictional one)xiv.
It would be easy to read Nihei's dystopic landscapes as we have often done with similar examples of apocalyptic, dystopic architecture in manga, that is to say as a negotiation of the trauma spurred by the atomic bombs, or the collapse of the economic bubble in the 1990s: while certainly there is a stylistic similarity between Nihei's architecture and some visual cues from Akira's ruins or Ghost in the shell's cyber layered city, the dystopian fantasy at the basis seems to be entirely different and, I would add, language and the way it (not) helps negotiating the environment is a marker of such difference.
I have already remarked on the nearly absolute lack of language signifiers within Blame!'s environment: events as the ones recounted in the article's introduction, in which language enters the picture both as a mimetic and as a structural element inscribed in the City, can be counted in single digits. The manga's characters almost universally interact with their environment on far more unmediated, sensorially engaged level, one that could be termed as 'after language', or similar to the kind of interactions with a priori objects as agents described by Object Oriented Ontologyxv. Killy's most frequent interaction with the City is the wholesale destruction of its architecture with his overpowering handgun, an action to which sometimes full double page spreads are dedicated: in extreme cases we don't even get to see the enemy that, allegedly, has been pulverized in the process, and that was meant to be the real target. Killy, and many other characters' interactions with their environment are not mediated by the normative forms of language and discourse (which govern contemporary mediation of the human environment) but are instead tackled in an animalistic, sensorially loaded kind of way, with great pain spent in displaying the immediate physical interaction with the environment as an object and agent, rather than the characters' negotiation and normalization of it through speech; as in the case of the belabored expositions so common in science fiction, especially of the dystopian variety.
In Blame!, essentially, the landscape is presented as an object per se, impermeable to human discourse and its surface non inscribed, with the result that its semiotics become all the more alien to us; far more than is the case with tamer and, in the end, more 'human' alien landscapes. If one were to look for a kindred vision within Japanese media, I think the most fitting example would be the cities seen in the animated version of Fist of the north star (1988, Hokuto no Ken), Buronson and Tetsuo Hara's ultraviolent, dystopically cynical science fiction sagaxvi. Here protagonist Kenshiro roams through a postapocalyptic landscape that has been stripped of all marks of humanity's collective knowledge, including signs and language: barren husks of buildings collapse and distort in the wake of destruction, yet they do not paint a discursively new, alternative future, even in the dystopian sense. All order enforced by language and discourse has been obliterated, and now the landscape exists only as a discarded artifact in mankind's teleologically ruptured march of progress.
No Relationships
Another aspect of the manga in which Nihei's imagining of a postlinguistic human condition comes to the fore is, unsurprisingly, the characters' interactions among and between themselves. Blame!'s speech poverty, both on a mimetic and on a structural level, sets apart the work from most other science fiction dystopias within popular Japanese media and, further, dystopian tradition in the West.
There is a host of research supporting the centrality of language, speech and verbal / written interaction in the context of futuristic dystopias. According to this research, language in dystopia more often than not holds an ambiguous allegiance: it allows the implicitly critiqued dystopian order to retain and disseminate its controlling, fascist agenda; yet, many times it also constitutes the vehicle by which a dissenting minority can critique, challenge and eventually change the dystopic order. In particular, Eike Kühl characterizes this dichotomy as 'control and resistance', a dynamic which frames 'the obliteration or control of the past, the relationship between language and control, the ban of literature and writing, freedom in language, freedom from language, and, at last, the relationship between language and social class': what this essentially means, is that language, both as an fictional actor and as a tool at the disposal of the writer, is usually abundant, multifaceted and at the forefront in future dystopiaxvii. The form that such centrality takes is, of course, of a different variety according to region and media: while Western literature abounds of dystopian fictional languages (Newspeak, Nadsat, DC Comics' Interlac), within Japanese media dystopian language as 'familiar alien' tends to bear itself by constructing complex architectures that mix more or less idiomatic Japanese with foreign lexicon, made up verbal constructions and the interplay of words and symbolsxviii.
Blame!'s use of language by characters within the story continues along this general paradigm, in the sense that the characteristics of language displays remark its centrality to the worldview presented: yet, this happens in a form that is highly sui generis, and essentially destabilizing with regards to traditional notions of language in dystopias. As previously noted, one of the most striking features of Blame! is the rarity of dialogue. Characters barely ever engage in conversation and, when they do so, the result is surprisingly stilted and monodirectional, resembling mumbling monologues more than actual dialogue: snippets of formulaic information interject in between large swathes of silent traveling, or a character will briefly explain a situation or idea, yet only receive as an answer blank stares from other conversation participantsxix. Occasionally, interruption of communication borders on the surreal, as when Killy, engaged in a quest with the scientist Cibo, replies to her concerns by anesthetizing himself and falling asleep on the spotxx. Finally, interruption of communication between agents is replicated also on the story's macro level: there is no engagement between the protagonists and the supposedly antagonist 'silicon lifeforms' beyond reflexive, instinctual assault and mutual annihilation on the spot; gone is the long honored manga tradition of drawn out speeches and exchange of retorts before confrontation.
Within Blame! language, unlike most other dystopic fictions, is important exactly because of its scarcity, its awkwardness, its implausibility. Each time we witness the truncated, aimless and largely irrelevant dialogue that makes the series an outlier within future dystopias, we are implicitly reminded of the constructed, artificial nature of language itself; and we are reminded that language, as a human artifice just like the rest of human culture, could easily collapse and disappear in a more or less remote future, becoming nothing more than a memory without purpose in the legends of futuristic foragers. Language in Blame! Is then, more than misshapen creatures or convoluted fictional architectures, the true 'familiar alien' within the series: a husk of a former discursive order that, in the reaches of a far future, has become truly alien and unrecognizable to us.
A Mute Protagonist
In the face of an erratic storyline and plenty of throwaway characters, there is but one constant in Blame!'s universe: the glum looking, largely mute protagonist – Killy. Blessed (or cursed) with a name that largely defines his approach to his mission and life in general, Killy is a virtually indestructible warrior, a relic of a past age that continues his mission in the meandering corridors of the city in spite of everything, including the mission itselfxxi. He does not entertain any meaningful relationship with other characters, and is generally impervious to pain as much as joy: he rarely changes facial expression even as he is dismembered, and only once in ten volumes he is seen smirking. Due to his invincibility, his immortality and his ability to connect to the City's cyber level without peripherals, Killy surely checks all the boxes for being defined as a posthuman characterxxii. Yet, I would argue that he is also an highly idiosyncratic posthuman; once again, communication, and especially language, is at the center of this idiosyncrasy.
It is striking to notice that most conceptions of the posthuman, in a variety of contexts and media, are essentially characterized by a surplus of often linguistic communication, and a parallel abundance of channels and modes by which such communication is established and upkept. Examples are ubiquitous. We could think, for example, of performance artist Stelarc who, since the 1960s, has been augmenting his own body with peripherals, both mechanical and organic, 'speculating on ways that individuals... may want to redesign their bodies': so far he has added to his body, among others, a mechanical third arm; an internal camera; and the structure of a third ear grafted to his armxxiii. He has also added to himself a second head, furnished with all features, through 3D imagingxxiv. Such peripherals (although still in the early stages of development) promise us a posthuman condition in which communication, even of the verbal and linguistic variety, will be greatly enhanced: in the case of Stelarc's vision, this will literally happen by a proliferation of sensorial and communicative organs.
We don't necessarily need to resort, however, to such extreme examples: within Japanese contemporary media, we can think of virtual idols Vocaloidsxxv. These human-looking virtual idols, coming in a variety of genders and features, display one trait in common: their virtual bodies, in and for themselves a novel form of cybernetic communication, are all equipped with gadgets that, metaphorically if not actually, enhance the character's potential for verbal communication. Their futuristic outfits include an array of microphones, headphones, built-in keyboards and other gadgetry that suggests a proliferation and enhancement of the character’s communicative role, which is eminently verbal and linguistic, as Vocaloids are presented to their public not merely as mascots for a digital product, but as singing performers in their own right. Stelarc's extreme body modifications, and Vocaloids' futuristic tools might look miles apart in aesthetics and disruptive potential, yet they can also be seen as expressions of a similar take on the posthuman: our future is, essentially, enhanced communication of the verbal / linguistic kind.
Through Blame!'s characters, and Killy in particular, Nihei offers us a radically different take on the posthuman condition. The manga's protagonist, a silent loner, not only does not possess any meaningful communicative enhancement, but could be defined as largely communicatively stunted, verbally or otherwise: he has little to no facial dynamics, has mostly renounced speech as a form of interaction with the world around him, and is adept at using instinctual violence as an exclusive communicative devicexxvi. Once again, the most apt comparison is to Kenshiro, Hokuto no Ken's protagonist: both him and Killy share the traits of a future subject that has renounced communication in favor of immediate, often reflexive violent actionxxvii. It should be noted that, even when communication does not take a violent turn, there is rarely any meaningful exchange of information, on a formal or content level: typically, Killy absorbs his interlocutor's monologue with barely any acknowledgement; receiving, in turn, a resigned shrug before the two part ways.
Overall, the series configures, through its protagonist, a posthuman subject that is a 'familiar alien' to humanity itself, and a rupturing agent with regard to the means by which humanity traditionally communicates and interacts. He is an outlier with whom communication is impossible; and, even if it was, others seldom attempt.
The End of Adventure Seeking
Once we have identified Blame! as a futuristic dystopia, in which language as a structure and a relational means has utterly crumbled, one question remains: is a way out of such dystopia offered to the characters, and to the reader? After all, dystopia as a genre itself is predicated on the existence of an oppressive order, and the equally unavoidable existence of instruments (as we said, often linguistic) by which escape from dystopia is offered. Is this also the case with Nihei's bleak vision of our future? The answer is, of course, resoundingly negative. The 'order of things' that communication and language enforced can no longer be recovered: Killy moves toward the end of his quest in complete loneliness, indifferent to an empty husk of a world in which all his comrades are dead or lost; even once Killy's search for the 'Net Genes' is completed, he remains a vacant wanderer, and no firm resolution to his teleologically vacuous journey is given.
The absence of all alternatives to the crumbling of discursive order extends at all levels. After all is said and done, even the series' subtitle, 'adventure seeker Killy in the cyber dungeon quest!' ends up sounding bitterly ironical, as the series' very subtext is predicated on the emptiness of such quest; and, surely, Killy not once displays the character of an adventure seeker, facing hosts of enemies with the same resigned ennui as he opens a door or falls asleep. Blame!, as a dystopic work of science fiction, radically critiques the existence of alternatives to a dystopia in which all meaning, discursive and otherwise, is irremediably lost: a bleak and frightening option, among all possible 'day after' scenarios.
iNihei Tsutomu, Buramu! (Blame!), 10 vols. (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1998). Scene from vol.3, p. 23.
iiSteven Best and Douglas Kellner, The Postmodern turn (Guilford Press,1998).
iiiWalter Meyers, Aliens and linguists: language study and science fiction (University of Georgia Press,1980); Myra Edwards Barnes, Linguistics and languages in science-fiction fantasy (New York: Arno Press, 1975).
ivGeorge Orwell, 1984 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949).
vMyst, PC video game (Cyan, 1993).
viStarr Friedman, “Language as a Familiar Alien in Science Fiction or, as Riddley Walker Would Ask, Wie Wood Eye Both Err Two Reed This?” Unpublished Thesis, 2009.
viiThe seminal text on language and dystopia is David Sisk, Transformations of language in modern dystopias (Greenwood Press, 1997).
viiiAldous Huxley, Brave New World (Chatto & Windus, 1932); Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker (Jonathan Cape, 1980).
ixAkira, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo (1988), translated as Akira, theatrical release (Streamline Pictures, 1988); Kôkaku kidôtai: Ghost in the Shell, dir. Oshii Mamoru (1995);translated as Ghost in the Shell, DVD (Manga Entertainment, 1998); Shin Seiki Evangerion, dir. Hideaki Anno (1995), translated as Neon Genesis Evangelion, DVD (ADV Films, 1997).
xThomas Lamarre, “Born of trauma: Akira and capitalist modes of destruction” positions: east asia cultures critique 16 (2008): 131-156
xiSusan Napier, Anime from Akira to Howl's Moving Castle, updated edition: experiencing contemporary Japanese animation (MacMillan, 2005).
xiiFriedman, 2009.
xiiiOstensibly, the plot revolves around posthuman (possibly cyborg) Killy, a fighter who roams a vast, mostly deserted cyberpunk Earth known as 'the City' in which remnants of humanity survive along with other transhumans. Here, he searches for the 'Net Terminal Gene', a genetic marker that allows interfacing with the City's computer system, and shutdown of the City's Safeguards, an automated defense system that systematically destroys whoever it comes in touch with. In reality, the manga's main plot line becomes mostly irrelevant past the first couple of volumes, and the manga proceeds through a series of mostly random and disjointed encounters, skirmishes, and side-quests.
xivMichael Foucault, “Nietzsche, genealogy, history' Language, countermemory, practice: Selected essays and inteviews. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977).
xvGraham Harman, The Quadruple Object (John Hunt Publishing, 2011).
xviHokuto no Ken, dir. Toyoo Ashida (1984). Translated as Fist of the north star, DVD (Manga Entertainment, 1999). I choose to address the anime version as it constitutes, in my opinion, a far more dystopic piece compared to the original manga: the latter is, for the most part, a shounen piece that still celebrates, although within a markedly violent context, the dictates of 'friendship, effort and victory'; the anime series displays more of a seinen paradigm, offering a bleaker, more nihilistic take on a possible future apocalypse.
xvii Eike Kühl, Newspeak, Nadsat and Laadan – the evolution of speech and the role of language in 20th century
dystopian fiction (unpublished thesis in the public domain, 2013), p.28.
xviiiNeon Genesis Evangelion is emblematic of this typology. Nearly all dystopic manga, however, displays to a certain degree the habit of forming a sort of 'newspeak' through gergal syncretism.
xixSee, for example, Nihei, Blame!, vol. 8 p. 60;
xxNihei, Blame!, vol. 6 p. 190.
xxiIn spite of not being written in katakana as one would expect, the kanji used for Killy's name, 霧亥, has no discernible meaning, and is clearly used only for its phonetic valence.
xxiiFor the markers of posthumanity, see Katherine Hayles, How we became posthuman; virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature and informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
xxiiiPaolo Atzori and Kirk Woolford, 'Extended-body: Interview with Stelarc' Stanford History and Philosophy of Science web site:http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/stelarc/a29-extended_body.html (accessed January 2014).
xxivMarquard Smith, Stelarc: the monograph (Boston: MIT Press, 2005).
xxvThe visual personalities of Vocaloid voice synthesizing software Vocaloid, developed by Crypton Future Media. Web site: http://www.crypton.co.jp/.
xxviKilly is seen occasionally using some kind of enhanced function in order to plug into the City's cyber layer. Nonetheless, when this happens the reader is presented with blank screens, barren of all discernible verbal content (for example, vol.10, ch.55).
xxviiWith a degree of difference, of course: unlike Killy, Kenshiro still belies an adherence to some form of moral or ethics – which is to say, adherence to an articulated discourse.
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