aporias of the digital avant-garde - intelligent agent · cussed include music videos,...

intelligent agent 06.02

Aporias of the Digital Avant-Garde

Steve F. Anderson

AbstractThis article maps two divergent trajectories within a nar-rowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based digitalmedia created between 1995 and 2005. Works dis-cussed include music videos, design-oriented shortfilms, and motion graphics by directors Michel Gondry,Virgil Widrich, Mike Nourse, Barbara Lattanzi, RicoGatson, and design firms Logan, Ramon & Pedro, andH5. These works are considered in relation to the histor-ical avant-garde – particularly the Structural film move-ment of the 1960s and 70s – and analyzed as respons-es to a range of cultural concerns specific to the digitalage. The analysis identifies movement toward two termi-nal points: first, a mode of remix-based montageinspired by open source programming communities andpeer-to-peer networks; and second, the emergence of amode of imaging termed the "digital analogue," whichforegrounds the material basis of digital production.

Aporias of the Digital Avant-GardeThis article maps two divergent trajectories within a nar-rowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based, digitalmedia – specifically: music videos, design-oriented shortfilms and motion graphics – created during the past tenyears. Despite the fact that the work under considera-tion here has rapidly proliferated and resonated withmany of the key theoretical issues in cinema and visualculture studies of the past three decades, it has beenlargely neglected by theorists and critics of digital cul-ture.[1] Part of the reason for this neglect is practical.The works themselves are often ephemeral or difficult toaccess and they tend to occupy a liminal positionbetween what is called "experimental" or "avant-garde"film and video, and the equally broadly defined field ofpractice termed "new media." These works therefore donot fit into any consistent curricular or publishing niche,are rarely a part of mainstream culture, do not receivetheatrical distribution or broadcasting, and are oftenregarded with suspicion as proper objects of study with-in an academic context.[2] Nonetheless, I will argue thatmuch of this work may be productively understood as aprocessing ground for some of the most compellingissues in digital culture, as seen across the broad spec-trum of contemporary media.

I am particularly interested in considering this work’spotential for understanding emergent approaches to theperception and construction of space, time, and bodies;the status of narrative; and relations between technolo-gy and material culture. As a point of entry, I propose toask whether this work may be meaningfully understoodin relation to the historical avant-garde, particularly the

Euro-American Structural film movement of the 1960sand 70s, and to explore resonances with a range of cul-tural concerns of relevance to the digital age. I do not,however, wish to spend much time justifying my use ofthe term “avant-garde,” which admittedly carries specifichistorical connotations which are not all applicable to thepresent discussion.[3] I will argue that these questionsguide us toward two primary terminal points. The first isthe movement toward a kind of "open source" videoauthoring modeled after the combined practices of opensource programming communities and peer-to-peer filesharing networks – two practices that have significancefor the future of digital media across a wide range ofproduction and distribution practices. The second is theemergence of what I call the "digital analogue," a modethat foregrounds material aspects of production seem-ingly in defiance of the conventional wisdom that digitalmedia are characterized by dematerialization and dis-connection from the physical world.

Because the title of this essay features the rather glar-ing oxymoron "digital avant-garde," it may be useful to

I will argue that these questionsguide us toward two primary ter-minal points. The first is the move-ment toward a kind of "opensource" video authoring modeledafter the combined practices ofopen source programming commu-nities and peer-to-peer file sharingnetworks – two practices that havesignificance for the future of digi-tal media across a wide range ofproduction and distribution prac-tices. The second is the emer-gence of what I call the "digitalanalogue," a mode that fore-grounds material aspects of pro-duction seemingly in defiance ofthe conventional wisdom that digi-tal media are characterized bydematerialization and disconnec-tion from the physical world.

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define these two terms in isolation in order to frame theuse I hope to make of them in juxtaposition. First, theterm "digital" rarely denotes a set of cohesive practices.Digital media are notoriously hybrid, often bringingtogether images, sounds, and objects that are comput-er-generated or mediated with others that originate inthe analogue, photochemical, or textual worlds. Thereis, however, a certain utility to "digital" as a historicizingterm, particularly as it implies its own eventual obsoles-cence. I am less interested, therefore, in defining "digitalculture" in terms of technology, than in attempting toidentify the social practices and preoccupations that areparticular to the digital age. One of the things at stakewithin the consumer culture that surrounds digital mediais the growing invisibility of its underpinning technology.This is of particular relevance given the current move-ment toward ubiquitous computing and wireless net-works; even flat panel monitors and microprocessorsthat are embedded in everyday objects seem to negatethe physical infrastructure of the computer and by impli-cation, its socio-industrial base.

Within visual culture, digital imaging has come to signifya parallel ontological shift away from the indexical traceof the photograph. Where photochemical imaging couldlay claim to a direct relation to the physical world, bothconventional wisdom and our own experience tell usthat digital images are differently disconnected from theworld they purport to represent. Although the problemat-ic of representing reality long predates the appearanceof digital technology, the early 1990s marked a point-of-no-return for the representational capacity of images. Inhis 1991 book Representing Reality, documentary filmtheorist Bill Nichols offered this almost sheepish dis-claimer:

[through digital sampling] The image becomes aseries of bits, a pattern of yes/no choices registeredwithin a computer’s memory […] There is no originalnegative […] against which all prints can be com-pared for accuracy and authenticity. There may noteven be an external referent. The implications of allthis are only beginning to be grasped. They clearlyset a historical framework around the discussionpresented in this book, which continues to empha-size the qualities and properties of the photographicimage.[4]

The previous year, in his influential book on 19th centu-ry visual culture Techniques of the Observer, JonathanCrary noted that digital imaging constitutes a categoricalbreak from the photographic processes that were devel-oped in the early 19th century. With digital imaging,Crary asserts, vision is relocated to

a plane severed from a human observer […] Most ofthe historically important functions of the human eyeare being supplanted by practices in which visualimages no longer have any reference to the positionof an observer in a “real,” optically perceived world.

If these images can be said to refer to anything, it isto millions of bits of electronic, mathematical data.[5]

The problem with digital images, as Crary defines them,is that they are not linked in an indexical relationship tothe "real world" – which he revealingly equates with the"optically perceived" world.[6] What is at stake here arenot merely the technical affordances of competing tech-nologies of vision but a philosophical metaphor describ-ing the way we attain knowledge about the world. But incharacterizing the ontological shift represented by digitalimaging in terms of loss, it is all too easy to find our-selves in a nostalgic desire for the prelapsarian authen-ticity of the photograph – a concept that is itself dubiousat best.

In his essay "Avant-Garde as Software," Lev Manovichextends this loss to the failure of the avant-garde to sus-tain the convergence of formal and political interests:

The old media avant-garde came up with newforms, new ways to represent reality and new waysto see the world. The new media avant-garde isabout new ways of accessing and manipulatinginformation […] The new avant-garde is no longerconcerned with seeing or representing the world innew ways but rather with accessing and using innew ways previously accumulated media.[7]

Manovich aptly describes the development of databasestructures and recombinant media that are crucial tonetworked culture, but his model overlooks the potentialof this new media avant-garde to engage new ways ofseeing the world that are rooted not in optical perceptionbut in the harnessing of data flows – a shift summarizedby Peter Weibel as a move "from the ruins of represen-tation to the practices of processing."[8] Part of the goalof this article is to understand the functioning of digitalnetworks as not merely a vehicle for the transmission ofdata, but a means of "seeing" and understanding theworld. At stake in this investigation is an emergentunderstanding of the ways media practitioners areenacting new forms of networked subjectivity and cre-ativity that are specific to an "open source" authoringmode. I do not mean to uncritically privilege these net-worked practices, which are as readily deployed for evilas for good, but to highlight the transformative impact ofnetworks on historical avant-garde tactics of appropria-tion and recombination.

Given the constraints of our present historical momentand the purposes of this essay, the "avant-garde" maybe defined as a non-singular and contradictory range ofminor practices that are dialectically related to – i.e,both resistant to and constitutive of – dominant mediasystems. These works are characterized by multiplicity,micro-politics and formal experimentation, and perhapsmost disquietingly, they are often exo-commercial – thatis, positioned in a marginal but necessary relationship tothe economically sustaining infrastructure of the enter-

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tainment and advertising industries. This definition is insympathy with David James' work on American avant-garde film of the 1960s, which debunks the old avant-garde / commercial binary as both false and mislead-ing.[9] At the level of both institutions and individuals,James argues for a historical model that acknowledgesthe fundamentally cross-pollinating relationship betweencommercial and experimental film practice.

My desire to reclaim the concept of the avant-garde forthe digital age comes from a firm belief in the relevanceof media to politics and culture, and the potential benefitof developing a critical apparatus for understandingthese exo-commercial practices as embedded in abroader context with economic and social implications.Holly Willis has further argued for the value of seriouslyconsidering these works as symptomatic indicators ofcultural obsessions, "Despite the general dismissal of

these works, many music videos, as well as designshorts, offer a compelling examination of some of thecentral issues that we face as a culture, and indeed,one might argue that these rather disparate artworksoffer a map of contemporary anxieties, fascinations andconcerns."[10] What is ultimately at issue in both "digitaland "avant-garde" is our ability to relate these terms tothe exigencies and struggles of everyday life. Put moresimply, the goal is to ascribe relevance to particularpractices of digital culture in a historical context. Thus, Ibelieve it is possible to treat the term "avant-garde" withrespect for its historical specificity, but at the same time,to make a claim for its continuing usefulness with regardto contemporary art practices that have evolved in paral-lel with commercial-industrial media.

Modernism and Avant-GardeIn her book The Originality of the Avant-Garde andOther Modernist Myths, Rosalind Krauss challenges thediscourse of originality on which the concept of theModernist avant-garde was based, arguing that "theactual practice of vanguard art tends to reveal that 'origi-nality' is a working assumption that itself emerges from

a ground of repetition and recurrence." Indeed, sheargues, originality and repetition are often bound togeth-er through shared formal and structural constructs, andshe identifies one such construct – the grid – as a privi-leged technique of spatial organization within the paint-ed modernist frame. For Krauss, photography providedthe final seeds of destruction of originality as the sinequa non of modernist art. Her argument turns approv-ingly to the photographic work of Cindy Sherman andSherrie Levine as marking a break with the modernistnotion of origin, moving instead into an era character-ized by the postmodernist discourse of the copy. Now,the operative question is whether the "discourse of thecopy" that so aptly described the Appropriationist move-ment of the 1980s (of which Levine and Sherman werea part) is still sufficient as a descriptor of what is atstake in digital media.

In digital media, the act of copying – a fundamental partof digital composition – has moved from figure toground, whether at the level of the individual pixel, thesample, or the peer-to-peer network. The status of thecopy is no longer at issue – it is as much of a given todigital composition as brush strokes are to painting. Tofurther update Krauss’ take on the dynamic interplaybetween originality and repetition, we must revisit herprivileging of the grid as a structuring framework. Thegrid, for Krauss, marked Modern art’s categorical with-drawal from representation and mimesis.

Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural,antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when itturns its back on nature. In the flatness that resultsfrom its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowd-ing out the dimensions of the real and replacingthem with the lateral spread of a single surface.[11]

Krauss goes on to ruminate on the irony of the avant-garde artist turning, again and again, in a celebration ofhis own originality to the form of the grid for its realiza-tion. "That so many generations of 20th century artistsshould have maneuvered themselves into this particularposition of paradox – where they are condemned torepeating, as if by compulsion, the logically fraudulentoriginal – is truly compelling."[12] She further arguesthat nothing less than the discursive collusion of muse-ums, historians, and makers of art has served to contin-ually assert the superiority of originality over repetition inmodern art, a conundrum that was left to postmod-ernism to outstrip.

Within digital media, however, it seems clear that the 2-dimensional X-Y axis of Krauss’ modernist grid hasgiven way to work that places equal if not greater fetishvalue on the Z-axis, and the possibility, if not the imper-ative of composing in depth using 3-D modeling soft-ware, video game engines, immersive and telepresenttechnologies, mobile media, etc. In his book Snap toGrid, Peter Lunenfeld identifies the 2-dimensional gridas the enemy of the digital designer, whose first act


Within digital media, however, itseems clear that the 2-dimensionalX-Y axis of Krauss’ modernist gridhas given way to work that placesequal if not greater fetish value onthe Z-axis, and the possibility, ifnot the imperative of composing indepth using 3-D modeling soft-ware, video game engines, immer-sive and telepresent technologies,mobile media, etc.


upon opening an application is to turn off the snappingfunction so as not to be constrained by the quantumlogic of arbitrarily imposed Cartesian coordinates. In thework under consideration here, it is possible to identifytwo responses to this tendency that suggest alternativesto the privileging of the Z-axis. Within the realm of the"digital analogue," there is frequently a gravitationtoward work that foregrounds the tension between flat-ness and depth, a kind of resistance to immersion thatarguably un-privileges 3-dimensionality. And in the zoneof networked communication, a figurative Z-axis may beunderstood to signify the dimensional structure of theInternet or the datasphere of wireless media that con-cerns practitioners of mobile and distributed media.

Open Source ParadigmWithin the realm of what may be termed "open sourcevideo" – i.e., re-edited video files that are traded onlineand via file-sharing networks – it is possible to view therhizomatic structure of the Internet as a corrective to theCartesian coordinates of three-dimensional space. Thisis particularly realized in the structure of global peer-to-peer distribution networks, which can no longer beregarded as external and posterior to the digital artworkitself. Instead, I believe we are witnessing a transforma-tion of the position of the digital artwork as fundamental-ly entangled with circuits of replication, recombination,dissemination, and along with them, endless potentialsfor productive mutation. Both Lunenfeld and Manovichhave described this transformation as a shift to "informa-tion-based aesthetics," impacting a broad base of digitalpractices from art and architecture to film and computa-tional media. When addressing works that emerge fromthe informational space of the network, we are dealingnot with originals and reproductions but memes andmutants – circuits of data flow and transformation thatassert their own ontological status. Perhaps most impor-tantly, we must address these networks in both materialand functional terms, as cultural formations that are theproducts of material and ideological necessity and notmerely passive conduits for data.

A recent cultural object to emerge from this space is theGrey Video, which was created and released anony-mously in October 2004, only to be shut down by therecord label EMI as part of its continuing efforts toenforce their control over copyright of the Beatles’ WhiteAlbum. The background to this story is widely known: onFebruary 24, 2004, a group called Downhill Battleorganized a day-long electronic civil disobedience actioncalled Grey Tuesday. Downhill Battle sought to protestthe legal action taken by EMI to suppress a remix by DJDanger Mouse that combined rhythm tracks from theBeatles’ White Album with vocal tracks from Jay-Z’sBlack Album to create the underground sensation TheGrey Album. During the 24 hours of Grey Tuesday, over100,000 copies of the Grey Album were reportedlydownloaded from hundreds of sites across the Internet

and an estimated million more copies were traded overfile sharing networks. At the same time, hundreds morewebsites demonstrated their support by converting theirhome page color palette to all grey. Although its impacthas been largely symbolic, Grey Tuesday is still regard-ed as the most successful instance of organized civildisobedience against the music industry’s actions toprotect its copyright against fan re-mixes. Nine monthslater, the Grey Album was followed by the Grey Video,which was created and released anonymously by thedesign firm Ramon & Pedro. [Fig. 1] The "official" GreyVideo website[13] was predictably shut down within afew weeks of its launch, although the video continues tocirculate on mirror sites and peer networks across theInternet.

Figure 1. Ramon & Pedro, Grey Video.

The Grey Video begins with a performance by theBeatles before a live television studio audience. Justmoments into the song, images of the rapper Jay-Zbegin to encroach on the performance and his own leadvocals are added to the background music of a cut-upBeatles song. Images of bumbling and ineffectual broad-cast engineers may be understood as a metaphoricaljab at the RIAA, who are powerless to recover control ofthe images being disseminated, first as Jay-Z’s imageappears on one and then all three television monitors inthe control booth and later as the musical remix causesa breakdown of both artists’ performance. As Ringo’sdrum kit is replaced by a set of turntables and the words"DJ Danger Mouse," the now vestigial musicians Pauland George are perfunctorily replaced by dancers; andJohn performs a virtuosic break dance punctuated by aprotracted round of spinning on his head and a screen-exiting backflip that leaves the singer's signature mop-top wig lying symbolically on the stage. On one level, allof this amounts to little more than a parodic gesture, butthe electronic civil disobedience of Grey Tuesday andthe visuals of the obviously hastily produced Grey Videoeloquently speak to both consumer frustrations withincreasingly restrictive copyright laws and the growingpower of peer networks to subvert their enforcement.

Apart from the barely noticeable R+P logo that flasheson screen at the end of the video, Ramon & Pedro


nowhere acknowledge responsibility for the Grey Video,which was made with no possibility of direct profit for thedesign team. Indeed, a disclaimer at the head of thevideo announces that it was made as an experimentand not for commercial purposes. But the video wasalso made in full knowledge that the official site wouldbe shut down and based on the trust that a decenteredgrassroots network would step in and take over distribu-tion of the video. I don't necessarily want to offer Ramon& Pedro[14] as outlaw media hackers – they are rathersavvy entrepreneurs who understand the economy ofvalue in viral marketing and the power of aligning them-selves (albeit slightly disingenuously) with the anti-industry, anti-commercial sentiments of today's remixculture. Taken in aggregate, however, I believe theDownhill Battle protest, coupled with the widespread,illicit circulation of the Grey Video may be seen asexemplary of a mode of practice that is defined by thelogic of the open source network at the level of produc-tion, distribution, and reception. At stake here is not somuch the functioning of a representational system or thecapacity of digital technology to create impossibleimages, but the broader alignment of network technolo-gies with cultural movements around intellectual proper-ty and copyright reform – all of which has significantimplications for questions about globalization and corpo-rate media conglomeration.

Digital Resistance?Among the most vocal advocates of the concept of adigital avant-garde that is directly engaged in resistingcorporate domination of media is the Critical ArtEnsemble (CAE), which argues unabashedly for workthat places "a high value on experimentation and onengaging the unbreakable link between representationand politics."[15] In their 2002 manifesto DigitalResistance, CAE elaborate on their call for a criticallyengaged "electronic civil disobedience"[16] that explicitlyworks to bridge the formal and political dimensions ofavant-garde practice. CAE argues that, just as capital-ism has become increasingly nomadic, mobile, dis-persed and electronic, artists and activists must respondin kind, modeling forms of digital resistance that areequally liquid but preferably operating by means that areless compatible with the status quo functioning of theentertainment industries:

After all, an avalanche of literature from very finepostmodern critics has for the past two decadesconsistently told us that the avant-garde is dead andhas been placed in a suitable resting plot in theModernist cemetery alongside its siblings, originalityand the author. In the case of the avant-garde, how-ever, perhaps a magic elixir exists that can reani-mate this corpse.[17]

The elixir they refer to is, of course, digital technologyand the increasing dependence of late capitalist eco-

nomics on global communication networks and their vul-nerability to cultural hacking. "The avant-garde todaycannot be the mythic entity it once was. No longer canwe believe that artists, revolutionaries, and visionariesare able to step outside of culture to catch a glimpse ofthe necessities of history as well as the future." In practi-cal terms, CAE propose "cellular constructions aimed atinformation disruption in cyberspace." They thus advo-cate hacking as both an art form and political weapon,which points to the importance of thinking not just interms of media objects and practices but their evolvingcontexts of distribution and exhibition. Unfortunately, thevocabulary of Hollywood film distribution obscures thefunctioning of networks and communities – some physi-cal, some online or virtual – within which digital files arecopied, reproduced, and traded. Within such a network,distinctions between viewers and producers are irretriev-ably blurred and the one-way logic of television broad-casting and theatrical distribution becomes the multi-directional, many-to-many dialogue of the BitTorrent net-work.

Remix as PoliticsMike Nourse's short remix video Terror Iraq Weapons isone of many short, "open source" videos to appear dur-ing the lead-up to the 2004 American presidential elec-tion. [Fig. 2] To create the video, Nourse extracted eachoccurrence (or variation) of the words "terror," "Iraq" and"weapons" from a single speech by President GeorgeW. Bush and grouped them in the order in which theyoccurred. Nourse's deceptively simple conceit poses asurprisingly effective critique of both the Bush cam-paign's mendacious association of al Qaeda's attack onthe World Trade Center with the regime of SaddamHussein and the central canard of the administration'sadvocacy of war, namely the existence of weapons ofmass destruction in Iraq prior to the American militaryonslaught in 2003. At the same time, Nourse's videoinvites us to think about the functioning of the newsmedia as a passive echo chamber for campaign andadministration talking points. The low-tech simplicity ofNourse's process invites viewers to imagine creatingtheir own variations on this project, transforming virtuallyany electronic broadcast into potential raw materials forre-editing and redistribution.[18]

The other thing that I find particularly interesting aboutNourse's video is the move toward thinking in terms ofkeywords as the primary means of understanding andreprocessing the content of a media broadcast, which ispeculiar to the database age. The attribution of metada-ta, such as keywords, to any media set constitutes asimilar process – the distillation of key concepts from afield of possibilities. The result, as with the information-handling capacity of a database system, is to amplifythe power of recombination and use of the data set, inthis case, turning media consumers into producers ofalternative or resistant meanings. I view the linguistic

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mutation of Nourse's video as distinct from other appro-priative practices in politically engaged documentaryand avant-garde film, such as Emile de Antonio's In theYear of the Pig (1968) or Charles Ridley's Panzer Ballet(1940), in which propaganda images are given opposi-tional meanings through reediting and recontextualiza-tion.

Figure 2. Mike Nourse, Terror Iraq Weapons.

Nourse's film and many others like it, including LenkaClayton's qaeda quality question quickly quickly quiet(2002), operate in a specifically linguistic realm, withalmost total disregard for the visual. Clayton's film,which has also been released in audio-only format onLP (thereby underscoring its relation to DJ culture),takes every one of the 3814 words in Bush's infamous"Axis of evil" State of the Union speech and simply re-edits them into alphabetical order. In both Nourse's andClayton's videos, the image of the president jumpsspastically around the screen, enslaved by the syntacticrearrangement taking place in the verbal register. Thiswelcome reversal of the usual image-sound hierarchyhas its most disruptive impact on the performativeaspects of the political speeches, whose constructedinflections and cadences are simultaneously subvertedand revealed by the imposed structure of the re-edit.Part of what interests me here is the fact that this reor-ganizing principle is based on mathematical or alphabet-ical algorithms that might appear to operate independ-ently of an ideological imperative.

Structural Film as Archetype This type of systematic, algorithmic manipulation strong-ly resembles the Euro-American Structural film move-ment of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which wasassociated with filmmakers such as Michael Snow,Hollis Frampton, Ernie Gehr, Paul Sharits, JoyceWieland, and Peter Kubelka, and which finds an activelegacy in the continuing work of filmmakers such asJames Benning, Su Friedrich, Morgan Fisher, andMartin Arnold. Although highly influential among experi-mental filmmakers, this work was deservedly criticizedfor its makers' decision to pursue a set of artistic inter-

ests that were fundamentally apolitical and inward-look-ing, even in the midst of the cultural turmoil surroundingthe Vietnam war and civil rights movements. For DavidJames, this movement aligns seamlessly with the con-ceptual and minimalist movements in the art world –posing an institutional critique of the art world's persist-ent effacement of the materiality of its objects. "Purefilm," as James calls it, constituted cinema's response toClement Greenberg's call for medium specificity, draw-ing attention to the surfaces and planes of the filmimage and its unique, artistic properties by using tech-niques such as scratched emulsion, loop printing, andmathematically derived editing structures.

Structural film is often misunderstood as a fundamental-ly reductive and solipsistic practice when, in fact, muchof the most interesting work is engaged in broaderquestions of historiography, narrative, memory, percep-tion, and cognition in the cinematic processing of spaceand time. Ernie Gehr's work is exemplary in this regard,fulfilling both the rigid structural impulse of the move-ment's most extreme adherents, while simultaneouslyengaging in broader philosophical, historiographical, andperceptual concerns. Likewise, Morgan Fisher’s body ofwork, which offers cinema's most esoteric and monoma-niacal examination of the processes and mechanics ofthe cinematic apparatus, also constitutes one of themost erudite commentaries on otherwise too-easily-sup-pressed aspects of the Hollywood film industry.

While Structural film has been largely regarded as afootnote within film studies, it has resonated withremarkable tenacity in certain sectors of digital mediaart. Lunenfeld's decision to include a chapter onStructural filmmaker Hollis Frampton in Snap to Grid, forexample, has been much commented upon as a bizarreanachrony in a book ostensibly devoted to digital cultureand design. But Lunenfeld's gravitation toward work byFrampton and other Structuralists is not merely idiosyn-cratic. The majority of Structural films are themselvesmathematical or algorithmic in conception – characteris-tics that are consonant with the workings of digitalmedia. Indeed Lunenfeld argues, "the ascendancy ofthe digital image has rendered experimental film ripe fora renaissance […] the experimental cinema can serveas a model for computer-inflected art. I believe, in fact,that the most interesting new media works aspire to thecondition of the experimental cinema without quite real-izing it."[19] In her book New Digital Cinema, Holly Willislikewise identifies Ernie Gehr's Structuralist classicSerene Velocity (1970) as a key progenitor of digitalmedia's fascination with space as "our era's primaryfocus of concern," noting that Serene Velocity was cre-ated within a few months of the prototype network thatwould become the Internet.[20]

A somewhat more literal case in point may be found inthe work of artist Barbara Lattanzi, who has created aseries of image processing systems that function ashandlers for online media she calls "idiomorphic soft-


ware."[21] These include EG Serene, which is namedafter Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity and which takes anypiece of Quicktime video and provides controllers thatallow users to approximate the editing patterns found inSerene Velocity (1970);[22] and HF Critical Mass, whichoperates on the same principle in order to mimic theediting structure of Hollis Frampton's Critical Mass(1971).[23] Part of the reason I find this interesting isthat Structural Film's attention to its material substrate,which represented the apotheosis of cinematic mediumspecificity and attention to materiality, is precisely thekind of relationship to the apparatus of production (thecomputer as object-machine) that is largely denied tomakers of digital media who are forced to operate in afield of zeroes and ones. In Lattanzi's work, however,the emphasis is on interface; on constructing systemsthat handle and reconfigure pre-existing media into newpatterns.

A handling system such as Lattanzi's offers users a formof empowerment and control that is of an entirely differ-ent order than conventional interactive narratives. It alsosuggests ways to talk about the specificity of digitalmedia that do not simply replicate the formalist impulsesof Structural film. While these projects openly pay hom-age to their Structural film predecessors, the connectionis relatively superficial and certainly ahistorical. A morevibrant and deserving legacy of certain aspects of theStructural film project may be found in the work of artistRico Gatson, who, in the last few years, has created aseries of videos using a simple form of digital manipula-tion performed on sequences drawn from Hollywoodfilms.

Figure 3. Rico Gatson, Gun Play.

Gatson's Gun Play (2001) extracts the scenes of vio-lence from two Hollywood genre films – Foxy Brown andThe Good, the Bad, and the Ugly – and compositesthem into kaleidoscopic patterns around a central axis.[Fig. 3] His work honors the rigid mathematical schemaof a Structural film through the symmetrical repetition ofimages, while simultaneously engaging thematic issuesof race, colonialism, and violence in Hollywood.Gatson's multiplied frames (which are ideally presented

as large-scale installations) and condensed soundtrackspeak to the formal seduction of the Hollywood specta-cle, which too often fascinates when it should repulse.Gatson shares with Nourse the alembic process ofreducing image sequences to their essence. Both proj-ects are also heavily dependent upon viewers' access topre-existing, extra-textual knowledge – the significanceof Nourse’s keywords in a presidential speech, forexample, or the perversity of merging Pam Grier's mostfamous blaxploitation character with the steely-eyedgunslingers of a spaghetti Western.

But Gatson's work, which emerges from the worlds ofsculpture and installation-based studio art, has a differ-ent relation to physical presence than the film imageshe appropriates. As a result, Gun Play and other struc-turally similar works such as Jungle Jungle (2001), andCelebration (2001), do not overtly address the transfor-mation that this work enacts on its original materials. Indeed, the straightforward mirror-imaging effect almostseems calculated to be non-labor-intensive, exploitingthe ease with which digital image processing softwareperforms tasks such as the multiplication and inversionof images. Gatson's work thus engages its subject pri-marily at the level of ideology and dispenses with thematerialist fixations of Structural film. For a critique ofHollywood stereotypes and structural repetition that isalso concerned with the physicality of film images, wemust turn to a mode of practice that is diametricallyopposed to Gatson's. Perhaps the most remarkableexample of this is the work done in the last few years byAustrian experimental filmmaker Virgil Widrich.

The Digital AnalogueWidrich, along with the filmmakers Peter Tscherkasskyand Martin Arnold, is part of a "3rd generation" ofAustrian experimental filmmakers who all share anobsessive interest in fragmenting and decomposing filmframes and working with movement and repetition withinthe frame. Until recently, Widrich was the only one ofthe three to work digitally. Both Arnold and Tscherkasskyhave prided themselves on rejecting digital technology,even as they create works that are deeply imbricatedwith the logic of digital media in terms of repetition andrecombination. Part of the reason I am interested inWidrich is that he is making hybrid films that include thereturn to paper as a substrate for the moving images hecreates. In the last three years Widrich has completedtwo films in this mode, Copy Shop (2001) and Fast Film(2003), both of which are based on a method of produc-tion that requires thousands of digital video frames to beprinted out on paper, folded, torn, and then re-animated.[Fig. 4] On one level, this work constitutes a return toprimitive cinema, the kind of frame-by-frame hand-madeproduction described by Lev Manovich as characteristicof digital cinema[24] – but on another level, it demon-strates a process that calls a genuinely unusual degreeof attention to the material substrate of cinema. Theresult for viewers is an acute awareness not only of the


materiality of the film they are watching but the layeringof moments in time that is allegorized through the pro-duction process.

Figure 4. Virgil Widrich, Fast Film.

Fast Film also presents an extreme and literal use ofintertextuality, in which characters from nearly threehundred different films move seamlessly through a sin-gle narrative space. The film suggests a re-assertion ofthe individual subject as the associative consciousnessof the narrative and assures that each viewing experi-ence will be different, as viewers recognize differentclips, characters and moments from each sampled film.The structure of Fast Film is that of a recombinant data-base that serves as both homage and parody in itsaffectionate pillaging of Hollywood history. Arguably, it isthe anxiety attending the ethereality of digital technologythat occasions this extreme foregrounding of materialprocesses – namely the crazy, obsessive work of print-ing, numbering, folding, tearing and then re-photograph-ing tens of thousands of film frames. Another factor isour immersion in an era when questions of copyrightand intellectual property have moved from the expertdiscourses of litigation and technology into the forefrontof many people's everyday lives.[25]

Widrich's rejection of the ease of digital compositing infavor of laboriously captured, printed, torn and foldedorigami animations provides part of the justification forits existence. This labor, in fact, gives the lie to contem-porary discourses about the ease and simplicity of digi-tal piracy and the lack of creativity among those whoviolate the copyright of others. The underlying labor isself-consciously referenced only once in the film, whena train chase ends by plummeting off the side of a cliff.After plunging downward through space, the animatedcutouts crash through the Mardi Gras cemetery scenefrom Easy Rider. The chaotic trains puncture thismoment of relative calm, burrowing down through thefilm plane into a thick stack of animation cels as ifdescending through the earth's core. In this moment,Widrich lays bare the part of his filmmaking process thatwould ordinarily be suppressed.

We may view this as a return to Krauss' modernist grid,which has been deliberately tipped over and laid on itsside along the Z-axis while a similar violence is done tothe frame – that other inviolable rectangle of modern art:nearly every image is torn, folded, sawed or crinkledand thereby committed to a new context before beingrephotographed. Fast Film is perhaps the quintessentialinstance of the "digital analogue" – a small but growingsubset of work that attempts to renegotiate the basicterms of digital representation as something thatrequires attention to the material substrates of even themost ephemeral practices.

Foregrounding the PhysicalWhile Widrich is the most virtuosic figure in this sub-movement, perhaps the most influential one is theFrench director Michel Gondry, who has taken low-techmaterialist aesthetics to new heights, famously con-structing animations out of everyday objects such asLegos (White Stripes, Fell in Love With a Girl), card-board cutouts (Chemical Brothers, Let Forever Be) andthe yarn figures that run amok, attacking a knitted iconof the Capital Records building – itself an icon of a for-mer age in analogue music technology – in Steriogram'sWalkie Talkie Man. [Fig. 5] Likewise, Gondry's brother,Olivier “Twist” Gondry created a video for the Frenchjazz ensemble Les Fils de Teuhpu’s Bricoleur, whichreplicates Widrich’s animation method, while simultane-ously parodying the labor-intensive process of animationby portraying a beleaguered worker who is forced tomanually sort thousands of unruly images that comprisethe musical performance.

Figure 5. Michel Gondry, Walkie Talkie Man.

It is not yet clear whether this fetishization of the materi-al is simply an inventive backlash against the excessesof digital image manipulation, or a straightforward pas-tiche of previous forms. However, the Gondry brotherscontinue to be responsible for some of the most innova-tive music videos of the present decade, in part thanksto their attention to film history. Michel Gondry’s homageto Busby Berkeley dance sequences in Let Forever Be,


Figure 6. Michel Gondry, Let Forever Be.

for example, relentlessly parodies the repetitive overuseof digital effects in music videos, especially the kaleido-scopic multiplication of bodies and mechanically choreo-graphed dance moves. [Fig. 6] The video seamlesslytraverses the boundaries of analogue and digital repre-sentation, interlacing digital images with cardboardcutouts and computer-duplicated figures with look-alikedancers. More esoteric is Gondry's (perhaps uncon-scious) homage to Hollis Frampton’s Zorn’s Lemma(1970) in the video for Jean-Francois Coen's La Tour dePise. Like the protracted alphabetic sequence inFrampton's film, the video presents images capturedfrom signs and text fragments in commercial culture.This visualization of the language in precise synchro-nization with Coen’s song serves to materialize the textof the vocals, in effect elevating the subtitles to the pri-mary content of each image.

Figure 7. Antoine Bardou-Jacquet's video for Alex Gopher's The Child

The materialization of text in an urban landscape isnowhere more in evidence than in French designerAntoine Bardou-Jacquet's video for Alex Gopher's TheChild. [Fig. 7] Bardou-Jacquet's all-textual rendering ofNew York city borrows its basic concept from JeffreyShaw's Legible City project from the late 1980s, whilestripping narrative volition away from the viewer.Whereas Shaw's project allows reader-users to simulatemoving through geographically and architecturally cor-

rect streets of Amsterdam, Manhattan, or Karlsruhe on astationary bicycle while reading the text of a storymapped onto buildings in the city, The Child delivers ahigh-speed chase through the streets of New York Citywith both landmarks and people rendered as all text.The tension that exists in these works hinges on theconflict between real and constructed environments, aswell as the insistent interplay of surface and depth. Thisstylized dimensional tension is taken to new heights inLA design firm Logan's Information Contraband video forDJ Money Mark. [Fig. 8] Eschewing even the minimalnarrative of The Child, Information Contraband revels inpure stylistic excess, drawing its inspiration from the col-orful visual aesthetics of Thai movie billboards, wheretwo- and three-dimensional characters interact, movingseamlessly between stasis and action. Also at issue inmuch of this work is an ongoing negotiation of the linesbetween live action and animation, and photographicand digitally generated space.[26]

Figure 8. Logan, Information Contraband.

Against Convergence; For SyncretismIt is a truism of the digital age that media have lost theirspecificity, that art history's cherished formal propertieshave been consigned to the dustbin of history, replacedby elaborately sequenced but otherwise undifferentiatedcombinations of zeroes and ones. The rhetoric of digitalconvergence began in the research laboratories atXerox PARC in the late 1960s and has been a dominanttrope of digital culture ever since. The concept provedagreeable to the computer and entertainment industriesas they sought to articulate a vision of technology toconsumers eager to purchase each successive genera-tion of media technologies en route toward one vastinteroperable digital system. Convergence also workseffectively at the level of practice by describing the mul-tifunctional software tools for digital designers who oftenmove fluidly across boundaries of sound and imageediting, visual effects, CGI, interface design, and anima-tion. Finally, convergence offers a useful model forunderstanding what is happening at the corporate level


in terms of mergers and the vertical conglomeration ofmedia and technology industries.

For some theorists, however, convergence marks a dan-gerous turn away from the specificity of individualmedia. Friedrich Kittler, in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter(1999), describes the situation with what seems to be arising sense of panic:

Before the end, something is coming to an end. Thegeneral digitization of channels and informationerases the differences among individual media.Sound and image, voice and text, are reduced tosurface effects, known to consumers as interface.[…] And once optical fiber networks turn formerlydistinct data flows into a standardized series of digi-tized numbers, any medium can be translated intoany other. […] a total media link on a digital basewill erase the very concept of medium.[27]

For Kittler, these undifferentiated streams of digital infor-mation threaten to obviate not only discrete media, butthe human bodies once capable of perceiving them. Theeuphoric dissolution of media and bodies resonated inlate 90s digital theories that emphasized the transitionfrom atoms to bits, and the celebratory figuring of digitalmedia as ethereal, disembodied, cyber. The ideology ofdematerialization – what Lunenfeld calls "vapor theory"– divorces the products and practices of digital culturefrom their position in history and the socially and materi-ally grounded circumstances of their construction.

According to this model, not only is it impossible fornon-specialists to understand the workings of digitaltechnology, a concomitant "myth of transparency" identi-fied by Laura Marks renders the material substrates ofcomputer technology invisible.[28] The promise of trans-parent, ideally functioning technology, Marks argues,taps into latent desires for virtual immortality. When weare reminded of the physical-ness of computers (e.g.,via their propensity for crashing), we are also remindedof their imminent obsolescence and with it our own mor-tality. As a corrective, Marks suggests looking for "digitalartworks that refer to the social circumstances in whichthey were produced, or that draw attention to the physi-cal platforms on which they were built."[29] For Marks,one such response lies in the fetishization of older,deliberately low-tech art forms such as ASCII art thatdraws attention to the physical shapes of letters on theprinted page.[30]

An alternative to the homogenizing effect of conver-gence may be found in the language of cultural anthro-pology. The term syncretism, which is used to describethe layering of cultural practices brought about by colo-nialism or immigration – the pantheistic worship ofCatholic saints in the Santeria religion, for example –may also be repurposed to designate the layering oftechnological practices within digital culture. Unlike con-vergence, a syncretic relationship does not imply the

erasure or collapse of distinct practices. Rather, itdescribes the combination of disjunctive elements into afunctional relationship that bears the continued traces ofeach object's former existence. One consequence of therhetorical shift from convergence to syncretism is thepotential foregrounding of historicity. Where conver-gence tends to be ahistorical, syncretism emphasizesthe temporal gaps between objects and artifacts thatremain embedded in their historical and culturalmoments – not simply on a technological register, but interms of their original cultural resonance. The concept oftechnological syncretism, then, permits an understand-ing of digital media with respect for the material ele-ments of which they are constituted.

Aporias of HistoryWhereas the Modernist avant-garde privileged materiali-ty as a means of exploiting the formal potentials ofmedium specificity, the privileged objects in this essaypreserve a relation to the material world that groundsthem historically. I believe we come closest to a mean-ingful engagement with the past through media whenthose media preserve a sense of their own embedded-ness in a historical moment and their material systemsof representation. Syncretic media, by definition, retaintraces of the various competing and sometimes contra-dictory forms of which they are composed. In theprocess, these hybrid works announce a relationship totheir medium that invites us to ask the right questionsabout how they are constructed and the potential rele-vance of medium specificity to understanding theirimportance. Arguably, it is through the foregroundingrather than the effacement of the material substratesunderlying certain instances of digital media, that wefind the most suggestive and historiographically relevanttraces.


I believe we come closest to ameaningful engagement with thepast through media when thosemedia preserve a sense of theirown embeddedness in a historicalmoment and their material systemsof representation.


The title of this paper pays homage to Hans MagnusEnzensberger's essay "The Aporias of the Avant-Garde"from 1962, a cautionary tale and critique of the dangersof the ideology of the "avant-garde" being tied to radicalsocial agendas. Enzensberger warns against the preten-sions of movements like Futurism that were so easilyswept up into the political ideology of fascism and theavant-garde's general tendency to slip toward variouslydoctrinaire forms of political sloganeering. AsEnzensberger argues, an avant-garde that is uncon-scious of its aporias – its internal contradictions andobfuscations – is even more dangerous than the reac-tionary politics that inevitably surface to resist it. It isparticularly important to be realistic about the limitationsof the work under consideration here; to see where weare in our historical moment and to recognize the factthat the vast majority of this work, for example, recapitu-lates the gender, racial, and geographic biases of theentertainment industries on which it depends. Likewise,we should question this work's implication in the tech-nology industry's discourses of democratization whileremaining in service to the interests of media conglom-erates and global technology industries.

But as lines between categories of digital art makingcontinue to blur, it is necessary to re-examine outmodeddistinctions between the practices and tools of cinema,video, music, animation, graphic design and motiongraphics. Just as digital practitioners move fluidly acrossthese boundaries, theorists and historians of new mediamust develop similarly mobile strategies of critical prac-tice unencumbered by the burden of past media andanalytical paradigms. It is not an avant-garde free ofcontradictions that we seek, but one that illuminates theposition of digital media in relation to systems of control– including the rules of representation, technology, andhistory.

Steve F. AndersonAssistant Professor of Interactive Media School of Cinema-TelevisionUniversity of Southern California746 W. Adams Blvd.Los Angeles, CA [email protected]://www.iml.annenberg.edu/instructors/sanderson

References:[1] Of course there are notable exceptions, especiallyHolly Willis' recently published New Digital Cinema:Reinventing the Moving Image (Wallflower, 2005). Thisis as good a time as any to acknowledge my indebted-ness to Holly Willis' thoughtful engagement with thisbody of work during her tenure as editor-in-chief of ResMagazine and co-curator of the ResFest, a traveling fes-tival responsible for promoting and exhibiting some of

the most interesting short form media of the pastdecade. Also of interest is Andrew Darley's Visual DigitalCulture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New MediaGenres (Routledge, 2000), which dealt with a previousgeneration of music video, and Scott Bukatman'sMatters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the20th Century (Duke, 2003), which is particularly usefulfor its commentary on the problematic role of pleasurefor academics who are concerned with popular media.

[2] The primary cultural vehicles for this work have beenlimited to festivals and trade publications, such as theUS's Res/fest; the UK's onedotzero and Ninjatune; andJapan's Gas TV.

[3] I would argue that this term is capacious and porousenough, even acknowledging its previous uses, to sug-gest a type of media art practice that is formally or politi-cally experimental, innovative or provocative and I askthe reader’s indulgence in accepting this as an opera-tional definition of “avant-garde” media art.

[4] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues andConcepts in Documentary (Indiana University Press:Bloomington, IN 1991), p. 4.

[5] Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: OnVision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (TheMIT Press: Cambridge, MA 1990), p. 2.

[6] From my perspective, both Nichols and Crary choosehighly unfortunate terms for describing the real world.Where Nichols writes about the "historical" world; Craryopts for "optically perceived” world, both of whicharguably raise more objections than they dispel.

[7] Lev Manovich, "Avant-Garde as Software,"http://www.manovich.net/docs/avantgarde_as_soft-ware.doc (1999), p. 12.

[8] Peter Weibel, "Jordan Crandall: Art and theCinematographic Imaginary in the Age of Panoptic DataProcessing" in Jordan Crandall, Drive, (ZKM: Karlsruhe,Germany, 2002), p. 2.

[9] See David James, Allegories of Cinema: AmericanFilm in the Sixties (Princeton University Press:Princeton, NJ, 1989).

[10] Holly Willis, New Digital Cinema (Wallflower Press:London, UK, 2005), Chap. 2.

[11] Rosalind Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Gardeand Other Modernist Myths (The MIT Press: Cambridge,PA 1993), p. 158.

[12] Ibid, p. 160.

[13] http://www.greyvideo.com


[14] The design team of Ramon & Pedro are actuallytwo Swiss designers named Antoine and Laurent.

[15] This position, of course, grows increasingly ironic inlight of the case mounted by the Justice Departmentagainst CAE member Steve Kurtz as retaliation for thegroup's activism with regard to biotechnology.

[16] Electronic Civil Disobedience and Other UnpopularIdeas was also the title of CAE's previous book(Autonomedia, 2001).

[17] Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media(Autonomedia: New York, NY, 2002)

[18] Robert Greenwald's well-meaning but overwroughtdocumentary about Fox News, Outfoxed: RupertMurdoch’s War on Journalism (2004), performs a simi-larly manipulative rhetorical maneuver in illustrating itscritiques against the network with rapid fire montagesequences culled from hundreds or perhaps thousandsof hours of recorded broadcasts. The result is a kind oftemporary, rhetorical assault that might seem discursive-ly dishonest and unconvincing to anyone who is notalready aligned with the film politically. For me, whatmakes Outfoxed interesting is Greenwald's decision torelease his original interview materials into the publicdomain to be freely used by others – which again under-scores the importance of the peer network over the indi-vidual artwork as a primary site of political resistance.

[19] Peter Lunenfeld, Snap to Grid: A User's Guide toDigital Arts, Media and Cultures (The MIT Press:Cambridge, MA, 2000) p. 120-1.

[20] Ibid. [9], Chap. 2.

[21] http://www.wildernesspuppets.net

[22] The system works with any piece of video footagebut Lattanzi recommends using pornography, surveil-lance footage, or home movies.

[23] Another example is Japanese filmmaker SueokaIchiro, who has completed a series of short films andgallery-based installations titled "Requiem for Avant-Garde film." Sueoka's body of work includes titles suchas A Film in Which There did NOT Appear SprocketHoles, Edge Lettering without Dirt Particles, which refer-ences George Landow's Film in Which There AppearSprocket Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt Particles and etc.(1966, 16mm, 4mins, US); A flick film in which thereappear Liz and Franky is composed under the score ofARNULF RAINER by P. Kubelka on NTSC (2000),which uses footage of Elizabeth Taylor from ElephantWalk (1954) and Frank Sinatra from Come Blow YourHorn (1963) to substitute for the alternating white andblack frames of Kubelka’s Arnulf Rainer (1960); andStudies for Serene Velocity (2003), which offers a directhomage to Ernie Gehr's Serene Velocity, exploring the

length of a hallway through rapidly varying focal lengths.

[24] In The Language of New Media (MIT, 2001), LevManovich somewhat ominously predicts a day when"given enough time and money, one can create what willbe the ultimate digital film: 90 minutes, 129,600 framescompletely painted by hand from scratch, but indistin-guishable in appearance from live photography."

[25] It is worth noting here that nearly every frame inFast Film involves the infringement of not just one butseveral different copyrights. It is ironic that Fast Filmshares a material mode of production with the films inthe Library of Congress' Paper Print Collection. This col-lection was responsible for the preservation of about3000 films made prior to 1912 when printing images onrolls of paper was the only way to register a copyright;and while the nitrate originals have long since disinte-grated or combusted, the paper prints have remained ingood condition. A related area to consider are the conti-nuities with the paper base of early computing, includingthe Turing machine and the punch card-based Hollerithmachine.

[26] For the most lucid and complete survey of this workwith regard to digital media's impact on visual culture,see Holly Willis' New Digital Cinema.

[27] Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter(Stanford University Press, 1999) p. 1.

[28] Another way to think about this is in terms of a shift,which has roughly straddled the turn of the 20th - 21stcenturies, from a culture that was defined by visuality –e.g., the image saturation of television, movies andadvertising – to one that is on its way to being defined, ifnot by invisibility, then by the tension between visibilityand invisibility as intangible global networks and aninformation economy continue to serve as a stagingarea for cultural anxieties. This is perhaps most painfullyapparent in the practice of color-coded terror alertswhich seek to articulate the nation's fear of invisible"sleeper cells" and international terror networks in thevisible register.

[29] Laura U. Marks, "Lo-Tek Media: ImmanenceOnline," ISEA 2000 International Symposium onElectronic Art;http://www.art3000.com/actes_doc/07_marks.rtf

[30] Indeed a sub-genre of ASCII-based videos hasappeared in recent years including the recent Beckvideo for Black Tambourine directed by Associates inScience; the all ASCII short film The Case of the EideticChild directed by Ryan McGinness and panOptic; andYoshi Sodeoka’s ASCII Bush, which converts GeorgeH.W. Bush's 1991 and George W. Bush's 2003 State ofthe Union addresses into online ASCII files;http://www.turbulence.org/spotlight/ASCII_BUSH


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