Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Hi Sean I am aware of the examples you give but that was not the sort of thing I meant when suggesting some form of data analysis of a text. I was thinking more about how you could mash-up discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and reader reception theory, on the one hand, and empirical linguistics and statistical semantic modelling, on the other. I imagine it would be a mess so was entertained by what a possible visualisation might resemble (a car crash?). If you look at http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/installations/utter/index.htm you might see something like this. The point I was seeking to make is that it seems ambitious to apply quantitative analytical methods to the understanding of something as subjective, fugitive and motile as a text (or other cultural artefact). I work a little bit with the Centre for Speech Technology Research here in Edinburgh ( http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/ ) and some of their most interesting work is in the multi-modal modelling of affect in speech, looking at automatic recognition of socio-linguistic interaction between humans in tightly constrained and controlled situations (eg: meetings). Speaking with the people leading this research is enlightening as they recognise how complex and difficult this area of research is. They are very humble about their outcomes to date and what they imagine might be possible in the medium (eg: 5-10 years) term, which is very modest (perhaps slightly better automatic phone answering systems or improved data-tagging). This is profoundly different to what is required to analyse the existence of a text ³in reading². Sorry to be off-topic again. Best Simon Simon Biggs Research Professor edinburgh college of art s.bi...@eca.ac.uk www.eca.ac.uk Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments CIRCLE research group www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ si...@littlepig.org.uk www.littlepig.org.uk AIM/Skype: simonbiggsuk From: Sean Cubitt scub...@unimelb.edu.au Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Thu, 04 Feb 2010 09:20:30 +1100 To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory Footnotes: On novel as data, see Franco Moretti¹s attempts to derive maps from large samples of novels (eg criminalLondon as described in London-set detective fiction: I¹m afraid I dioon¹t find it hugely convincing, but there it is.Lexical analysis (eg Jacobson and Levi-Strauss¹s famous analysis of Les Chats) and discourse analysis (Norman fairclough and Teun van Dijk) likewise undertake lexical and syntactical analsyes with considerable succes, articulating the formalist and hermeneutic/political-ethical in areas like van Dijk¹s work on racism David Chirot mentions Menezes wonderful work. See also Adalaide Morris and Thomas SWISS (eds), New Media Poetic(small plug for Leonardo Books!); and my favourite Ian Hamilton Finlay A Visual Primer by Abrioux On 3/02/10 8:39 PM, Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk wrote: A number of interesting threads are evident in this posting. The primary hypothesis seems to concern why there has been an avoidance of employing quantitative research methodologies in the arts and humanities. Following from that, the questions raised are foundational, asking whether this is primarily due to the epistemic and cultural histories of such research or the character of the data-sets encountered, or both. Indeed, can one speak of data-sets within the typical foci of the arts and humanities (manuscripts, films, artworks, music, etc). Can a novel be rendered as a data-set? Can a reader¹s interpretation of a text be rendered as data, accepting that a novel exists not only within the pages of a book but in the context of its (public and private) reception? Is what is the case for a novel also the case for other cultural artefacts, such as animation, or do different kinds of cultural artefacts require different analytical models? If a novel, or other artefact, can be rendered as data then what value might flow from that? If we were to visualise a data-set derived from a quantitative analysis of a text and its interpretation (the latter proposition would seem to require mind-reading technology we currently do not possess, whatever might be claimed for current scanning and imaging technologies) would that visualisation really be worth a thousand words? Subsequent to these questions, we might need to inquire into how and why conventional quantitative methods are applied within their normal contexts and ask whether the outcomes revealed through that analysis reveal positive or negative consequences for research in the arts and humanities. We might then seek to steer our inquiry towards addressing whether such methods are necessarily appropriate in the traditional quantitative sciences. We might ask, sympathetically, as is proposed here in the application of quantitative methods to traditionally qualitative subjects,
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Hi, Tom, Your suggest that animation has migrated from image development to movement is fascinating.I'm wondering how you would distinguish animation from cinema or even video in this regard. Is there a fundamental difference if we think of movement as the 'thing'? And could you say more about your suggestion that affect is crucial to judging how layers move across media, even transnationally. Is your concept of affect tied to motion/movement itself, or need it be related also to narrative and to the national/transnational distinctions that narrative (and image) often foreground. I know that there is strong interest across the -empyre- community in the linkage between affect/narrative/movement, so it would also be interesting to hear from other subscribers who migth have specific projects of animation in mind, such as the performative display of transnationalism, say, in the interactive animations of Tamiko Thiel or in the sexual disjunctions of Sadie Benning. Any thoughts? Tim Hi Renate, If I could intervene... I think this is precisely where the question of movement and the analytics of movement is crucial. It is often said by scholars in Japan that character design has replaced character animation; in fact, they say, there is so much emphasis on design and typography that animation itself is vanishing. This has almost become established wisdom. Yet within the animation and video game industries in Japan theses days (and remember these remain really large industries) they say that, if there is not the same kind of movement attributed to characters with the frame (by thinking across frames), it is in order to allow them to flash across media. In other words, I don't think that this is something that can be measured. Although I am really interested in the sort of cultural analytics that Lev presented, I think that they avoid the question of movement, and thus a host of other issues that we now associate with poststructuralism and deconstruction. That sort of analytics is ultimately data about images. In animation, movement introduces questions about sites of indeterminacy which are where interactions happen. This is where one can speak of a affect and of a field for the emergence of power formations. I previously mentioned that multiplanar image, because it is with the layering of sheets of celluloid to produce animation that limited animators in Japan discovered that the actual design of image layers mattered less than the movement between them. This doesn't mean that they give up on design. In fact, design and typography became even more pronounced. But by moving away from animating characters and other entities, they found that the design became mobile across media, as if suppressing movement at one level allowed them to impart movement at another level (across media). This explains a great deal about why Japanese animations enjoy such success in distribution through internet fansubs and scanlations (adding new layers of design). It is about the movement of layers across media, even transnationally. And affect becomes really crucial to gauging this. Because you can't suppress movement at one level and enhance it at another without fundamentally changing interactions. There is a wonderful animated film - toL's Tamala 2010 - that plays with these dynamics, partly as an avant-garde critique of circuits of production and distribution of animation, partly as a perfect expression of it. Tom -- Timothy Murray Director, Society for the Humanities http://www.arts.cornell.edu/sochum/ Curator, The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art, Cornell Library http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu Professor of Comparative Literature and English A. D. White House Cornell University Ithaca, New York 14853 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
[-empyre-] design vs. animation
Dear empyre, Our discussion this month is on animation and from my perspective animation is a very broad and all encompassing medium and includes not only high corporate production (disney, pixar) but also independent artistic production. That said what fascinates me is that there seem to be two, maybe three trajectories of the discussion so far. So I post this question to all of you (I think this points to Tim's last post about film theory) what's the advantage of theorizing about the moving animation as opposed to the still frame? What does it mean to take images that were meant to be still, a painting for example, and activate the still image via data visualization? What are the implications of studying the haptic flow of the moving image and its affect? Can we come up with some kind of theoretical agreement about its effect on the maker, the theorist and the viewer? I think that the trend in Japan that Tom describes is one that warrants some time to talk about. snip It is often said by scholars in Japan that character design has replaced character animation; in fact, they say, there is so much emphasis on design and typography that animation itself is vanishing. It has been my observation that in watching most particularly art students, their obsession with making obscures their understanding of what is between and certainly of what is overall received by the viewer. In observing the computing students working on gaming, their obsession with the programmatic aspects clouds their visions of the image and also the moving images overall affect on the viewer. For this reason I see the process of animation a multi-disciplinary venture. Just look at the credits of the movie Avatar and the orchestration of the cast of thousands! Thanks Tom for the link to toL's Tamala 2010...I'll share it with my students tomorrow as well as your glorious description of the theory of culture and flow! Best to all of you. Renate Renate Ferro Visiting Assistant Professor Department of Art Cornell University, Tjaden Hall Ithaca, NY 14853 Email: r...@cornell.edu Website: http://www.renateferro.net Co-moderator of _empyre soft skinned space http://www.subtle.net/empyre http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empyre Art Editor, diacritics http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Tim, The differences between cinema and animation are really interesting, and historically they develop out of different sets of techniques that today are coming together in novel ways. I am thinking primarily of cel animation here but the techniques do apply to animation more broadly. With the introduction of celluloid sheets into animation in the mid-1910s, animators were able to play with layered images with greater flexibility. There is a material limit, of course, to how many sheets one can stack and still film them, and with celluloid sheets animators gradually moved toward using animation stands (which became standard in the 1930s), which are basically apparatuses to keep the sheets separate, allowing for better lightening between sheets but also allowing animators to move sheets to produce movement within the image. Sliding sheets relative to one another produced a sense of movement. Already animation was gravitating toward compositing or 'editing within the image' rather than montage as in cinema. And needless to say, animated films are usually not edited like live action films are; the layered image sequences are expensive to produce, so you don't start cutting and hacking the footage. In this sense even montage is subordinated to the 'multiplanar image,' that is, an image composed of image layers. And the force of the moving image is not channeled into camera movement but into character movement. The gaps between sheets in the image become very palpable under conditions of movement, that is, when images are projected. This is one kind of shock of the image so to speak. So a lot of technique in animation was channeled into managing the sense of movement between layers. This is what I like to call an animetic machine. For it is machine in Guattari's sense of the word - folding into it all manner of other modes of expression, techniques, etc. Disney is famous for doing his all to suppress this movement between layers, in two ways: exaggerating the fluidity of character animation (full animation) and developing the multiplanar camera system. This latter allowed animators to produce a sense of movement into depth by continually readjusting the intervals and relations between celluloid sheets in the animation stand. It felt like the mobile cinematic camera-almost. It was also really labor intensive, making for huge Fordist production studios. In effect, Disney made animation more like cinema in the sense that he struggled to suppress the effects of the multiplanar image by using the multiplanar camera system to eliminate the sense of gaps between layers and to make the image feel solid enough to move into. But I would say that this actually runs counter to the tendencies of animation. It was the renegades from Disney who turned to limited animation, where character animation is deliberately reduced, and graphic design comes to the fore, at the same time that movement between layers becomes more palpable and a site of experimentation. Japanese limited animation (anime) studios from the 1960s on took these experiments in all sorts of odd fantastical directions. This sort of dynamics - emphasizing or suppressing the multiplanarity of the image - persists today. Software packages for the Disney-style multiplanar camera system are built into computer animation, and many digital animations today work to suppressed the play between layers. Interesting enough, those that do not - a great deal of anime, Japanese video games, and video art - have discovered a very different potential of the moving image, one that is today the basis for transnational media mixes. It is not just evil corporations that are working with this potential of the moving image; very localized fan cultures and media groups have made this sort of animetic machine the basis for a range of novel modes of expression. This is where the question of affect for me seems crucial, and Deleuze's work on cinema very useful. In effect, full animation (especially of the Disney brand) is much like the classical cinema that Deleuze characterized in terms of movement-image (actually a subordination of variety of image types to the action-image). The trend of limited animation is toward the time-image, and animation starts to think and feel, for the movement-image can no longer contain the variety of images within the action-image. This happens in a specific way in limited animation, where movement is spread across the surface of the image, and the elements of the image are thoroughly dehierarchized. There are no central versus peripheral elements. We might say that this invites spectators to put together the elements of the images and across the images in any manner they like. But since this is an event, they are already doing it without invitation. In the context of Japanese limited animation, this marks the rise of affect-centered do-it-yourself narratives. And
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Having seen Lev Manovich's presentation at DAC, I am dazzled by the strong potential of cultural analytics. I have been doing the pauper's version of this for years, telling some of my more dedicated visual culture students: head to the library, grab a stack of bound periodicals (or one of the various design annuals) and flip through them manually, after looking at twenty years, you will see a progression. Shifts in palette, layout, font. What this enhanced method allows is for a person to do the same thing, except with a certain layer of abstraction imposed by larger quantities, and without the distraction of overt content. The strength of this method, as I see it, is not in the conclusive nature of such analysis, but in the support that it offers for certain types of thinking about visual culture. For instance, you would not be able to point to particular changes in rhetoric and narrative, but at points of radical shifts in visual composition, you could go back and see if the visual shifts correspond with shifts in ways of thinking/speaking. A particularly interesting case study, I imagine, would be to look at cinematic imagery across the period in which CGI is introduced. While digital effects strive for a certain continuity with the visual register of the remainder of the film (for instance, the Matrix, for all its animation, works hard to keep its animated sequences consistent with the live action sequences), it would be interesting to see how the introduction of this technology transforms the overall character of live action. In other words, will our conception of reality become cartoonish? I would speculate that the tendency with representational innovation moves along the same path as technological innovation in general. It begins with a few eccentric, paradigm shifting examples, but then as the technology is universally adopted, it is moderated by a strong reactionary tendency, and the process of change happens more slowly from this point out. (I don't know if this model of change is specific to consumer cultures and the need to maintain profitability in the face of revolutionary change). Using these sort of macroscopic views would help us understand these phenomena better, provided they are constantly recirculated through various critical approaches. In other words, they can alert us to shifts, but cannot interpret those shifts. A second interesting relationship would be to map the effectiveness of culture industries in initiating shifts in popular taste. For instance, it is a common practice for clothing designers to decide which color schemes will be in style for a given season. The new color scheme must at once depart significantly from previous regimes (to ensure more purchasing), to be internally coherent (so that this year's styles will function at sufficient scale to be profitable), to be distinct from competing brands, and to be desirable to their clientele. It would be interesting to study the epidemiology of subdued colors or clashing juxtapositions. (Although you run a real risk of teaching people how to sell crap more effectively so, I suppose any knowledge generated by this method should be married to wisdom of some sort.). What I would hope to see emerge out of the long range use of cultural analytics is a more robust critique of the various analytical processes themselves. If cultural studies scholars learn how to use and interpret these studies, we have opened the back door to a more fully developed study of an emerging force in the culture at large. Where we find problems with cultural analytics, we will also find problems with the various other data-mining projects that are being used to predict and manipulate human behavior without concern for humanistic questions (rather, the description of people's shopping habits, for example, is being used as an explanation for human behavior Detroit makes SUVs because people buy SUVs.). Finally, I have to admire the openness with which this work is being shared. I simply do not have the resources or technical support to have supercomputers do this work. And the fact that someone is doing it in the spirit of the University, from a humanistic perspective, means that this type of study is not totally monopolized by military and corporate institutions. It is, in the end, a scary form of knowledge both for what it can reveal about human behavior AND for its general inaccessibility. But, it is knowledge, nonetheless. Davin ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
I just had a chance to look at Patrick Crogan's excellent article THE NINTENDO Wii, VIRTUALISATION AND GESTURAL ANALOGICS: http://culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/374/397 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Simon Biggs wrote: Hi Sean I am aware of the examples you give – but that was not the sort of thing I meant when suggesting some form of data analysis of a text. I was thinking more about how you could mash-up discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and reader reception theory, on the one hand, and empirical linguistics and statistical semantic modelling, on the other. I imagine it would be a mess so was entertained by what a possible visualisation might resemble (a car crash?). If you look at http://hosted.simonbiggs.easynet.co.uk/installations/utter/index.htm you might see something like this. The point I was seeking to make is that it seems ambitious to apply quantitative analytical methods to the understanding of something as subjective, fugitive and motile as a text (or other cultural artefact). // Ambitious, and necessary... Data analysis is an important aspect of these threads (although my interest includes text). Are you perhaps stating precisely the challenge to data/text mining, to design or develop a means of accessing this (connotative?) level of discourse? I am thinking for example of the Digging into Data Challenge http://www.diggingintodata.org/ ( I participated with a group that was not awarded one of the few grants). What do you do with a million books? (or umpteen million, thinking of the Google digitizing project) ... or a million animations? The challenge relates to my post in October about the possibility of inventing an approach to Web Ontologies using poststructuralist ontologies. Lev's work is relevant here of course. As the (more or less) entire archive of books becomes available online via full text search, we will be (are) in a condition of the information sublime. Is the unity between the animation question and text mining found at the level of database design or Web Ontologies (if all content is digital)? Learning much... thanks everyone for the bibliographies Greg -- *Gregory L. Ulmer* http://www.english.ufl.edu/~glue http://heuretics.wordpress.com University of Florida ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Davin, Paul Ward will be our guest on empyre in a couple of weeks. Thanks so much for citing his work. Renate This is a great discussion. And there are lots of interesting twists and turns, so forgive me for ignoring a whole bunch of other things to that I can focus on one: Simon Biggs asked: Seeking to assure the topic remains the focus I will ask whether animation, closely related to visualisation in some ways, might be a cultural form of expression with particular relevance in a world that is being progressively rendered instrumentalised through gradual processes of quantitative ordering. I think this is one of the most important questions to ask about animation. While there are certainly purely aesthetic elements to the increasing prominence of animation, there are also a whole bunch of really important cultural, technological, and economic questions that are related. While the visual aesthetics of animation are significant, there is also an aesthetic dimension to the temporality of animation. How motion is represented is, in my opinion, often related to how space and time are experienced. The constraints of space and time are significant both in how they contribute to our notions of reality and how they exist in tension with our desires. (I am going to cannibalize an article that I wrote a while ago, so pardon the abrupt shift in tone). In his article on Jurassic Park, Alan Cholodenko notes that animation may very well be what cinema has aspired to all along: By means of computer animation techniques operating not at the old 'mechanical' level of the exotechnical but at the level of the esotechnical, Jurassic Park ecstacizes the process which it declares to be at work in 'cinema' 'itself', pushing the special effect to its limit, its fulfillment and annihilation. While Paul Ward, in Animation Studies, Disciplinarity and Discursivity, posits a definition of animation studies that situates it as a cultural studies artifact par excellence: My suggestion is that we need to develop a discursive view of apparently 'multi-sited' fields of knowledge, like Animation Studies: rather than making what are ultimately false calls for recognition of yet another free-standing discipline, the dialogic and dialectical relationship between fields of knowledge must be seen as the central focus (par. 1). In other words, animation is formed at the points of contact between several disciplines - it is mass media, fine art, literature, and/or cinema. Indeed, in this context, the argument put forward by Ward in Animated Realities on realism affirms the representational power of animated images. If we take the claims of theorists like Ward and Cholodenko seriously, we are poised to reconsider just what we mean when we speak of animation. If, we accept, as I've described above that animation is a process of assembling still images from outside of the constraints of space and time in series to create motion, then we have a meaningful lens for understanding the pleasures of traditional animation. Common cartoon gags that run through works of animation icons like Tex Avery, Friz Freling, Ub Iwerks, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett (running off of a cliff and pausing to contemplate the situation, the use of Rube Goldberg machines, the superelastic cartoon body, the direct address of the viewer, the appearance of the animator's hand, etc.) suggest both meticulous attention to comic timing and a desire to perpetually accomplish the impossible. In the era of analog production, this tension between order and revolution finds free reign in the animated realm. And though the manipulation of clock time does exist in traditional cinema (particularly in the process of editing), the time of production for the animator is a time of perpetual editing undergirded by pressures (to complete the work and get it to market). But nevertheless, the animator performs seamlessly a series of impossible jump cuts, assembling the pictorial world outside of time. Hence the interest in representing this process playfully, in pushing it, and testing its boundaries. And, given the industrial employment of audiences, this playfulness surely found pleasure in the possibility of subverting the hard rules of space and time through subjective practices (this playfulness also appears films like Chaplin's Modern Times or Keaton's Cops). In the digital era this changes. As CGI and other digital production techniques have become more common, we have seen applications of the technology which showcase their novelty (see for instance, the Bullet Time slow motion of The Matrix, the re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy, or technocentric spectacle of Tron). But the emergence of a CGI-film aesthetic in films (like 300 and Beowulf), the common use of CGI for TV series (like Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, and the new Battlestar Gallactica), and CGI commercials (like Pepsi's I'm Spartacus commercial)
