Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
I agree with Tom¹s sympathies here. My earlier emails on cultural analytics were critical, not damning. I also agree that there is intense pressure in academia for the non-quantitative subjects to quantize themselves in some manner. Nevertheless, the argument should be fought from one¹s high ground. To accept the quantitative mantra at the outset is to have lost the war before battle has been engaged (no more military metaphors I find them disturbing). In the UK the ground has shifted somewhat with the creation of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, alongside the other councils (Medical, Engineering and Physical Sciences, Economic and Social, etc), and thus qualitative and practice based reflective methods are now accepted as valid research modalities. Nevertheless, there are considerable pressures to instrumentalise such activities, the government (which still funds 90% of all research in the UK) demanding that research proposals can demonstrate their economic and social impact in advance of the work being done. The irony is that this has negatively impacted on the blue sky sciences (physics, astronomy, etc) and certain traditional humanities subjects (medieval studies, philosophy, etc) but has favoured practice based activities, which have tended to be public facing (involving exhibition, broadcast, networks, etc). It is a double irony as the government introduced these guidelines partly to bias monies towards STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and medicine). I would still argue that what is being presented as ³cultural analytics² will fail in its objectives without accounting for the reception (contextualised and/or inter-textual reading) of artefacts as well as their formal and material existence. Best Simon Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk si...@littlepig.org.uk Skype: simonbiggsuk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ Research Professor edinburgh college of art http://www.eca.ac.uk/ Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice http://www.elmcip.net/ From: Thomas LaMarre, Prof. thomas.lama...@mcgill.ca Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Sun, 7 Feb 2010 11:22:22 -0500 To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory If I have reservations about such research developments, it is not in the spirit of objection or rejection. What is more, it is clear that if we don't undertake any of these challenges in the humanities, we won't set any of the directions or agenda, since researchers, largely in cognitive science, are leaping in it, and with a massively scientifistic attitude - perhaps to compensate for the fact that, at the end of the day, actual scientists (chemists, physicists, biologists) don't consider such work any more scientific than Freudian psychoanalysis. Agreeing with Foucault, however, that institutions are not structures but sites of confrontation, I am willing to confront. Edinburgh College of Art (eca) is a charity registered in Scotland, number SC009201 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Lev, Thanks for such cogent and insightful presentation of the question of continuous variation in digitally produced images. This is one of the really interesting developments in animation and cinema, and as you've noted elsewhere (if I am not mistaken), it is one that entirely shifts the relation between cinema and animation and even between full and limited animation, in a way that makes animation generally an important paradigm for understanding new media - due the the greater emphasis on what happens to a broad range of elements within the image or in the frame, which leads to transformations in movement between images (at the same time that it is harder to speak of a single discrete space between images in the manner of celluloid filming with snap by snap footage). Two things interest me about how the continuous variation a number of elements in the image impacts designers who are working on films, series and OAVs that are still called animation. First, even though today there is greater control over the variation of a number of elements with digital computers, there are techno-aesthetic precedents within certain lineages of limited animation, which were worked out between interactors (otaku fans) and producers (who were themselves otaku fans), from the late 1960s, but especially in the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, with the introduction of the VCR, 'viewers' transformed into co-producers or co-operators because they began to watch these animations in terms of variations of elements within the image by replaying the animations over and over again, noting how the variation of elements (changes in colour and line) could be 'read' independently of any overall narrative or directorial vision (usually not much in evidence). In fact, this sort of interaction began to take precedence over the modes of perception and interaction that today we tend to attribute to analog media. So, with the development of digital computers , there was not a strong sense of a break but rather a transition that confirmed, reinforced, and extended what was already happening. Many animators avoided the American models for digital animation entirely, seeing them as reactionary throwbacks designed to hide or compensate for continuous variation. I don't think it a coincidence that this happened in the context of large-volume production across a number of small heterogeneous studios in Japan, rather than in the much smaller volume large studio productions typical of North America (although there was always a great deal of interplay between these at some level). I also don't think it a coincidence that it is the same animations that enjoy the greatest transnational popularity, not to mention the greatest presence on line, and go hand in hand with micro-masses (sometimes called fan cultures or subcultures). See Tinami and Wikipedia. In other words, these transformations are worked out not merely at the level of producers making animations to consumers (classical communication/consumption model) but also at the level of socio-aesthetic formations wherein the role of consumer (already reworked socially by shifts in the relation between production and consumption) shifts toward interaction or co-production. The idea of a cooperator in emergence theory probably captures something of this interaction better than terms like co-producer, though. Second, if we take seriously the long history of scientific thinking about, and experimentation on, materiality that begins, in the late 20th century, to draw more and more heavily on radical empirical notions of continuity and continuous variation (non-atomistic approaches), it seems to me that the term 'continuous' should not mislead us in thinking continuity or continuum in simplistic brute materialist terms. Rather, the materially and phenomenologically continuous is at once discrete and continuous. It implies a spacing that is traversed by a force or forces (to use the term generically), in a non-dualistic or interactive dualistic way. So the question of the impact of such 'constant change' might well be asked at the level of 'material spacing' and 'force.' Constant change may well become a ground that is at once acknowledged and ignored at the level of media competency and literacy. Nonetheless, we're still dealing with forces, and thus a mobile active ground and n ot a foundational moment that is itself unchanging. (Analogously, even if there is greater emphasis on what is in the frame, there are still questions about saturation and about outside of the frame, which cannot be kept forever outside.) Otherwise, it is a model that cannot accept disruption or disjunction in any guise, in defiance of what we actually think to be true scientifically of matter and materiality. It is to address such issues that I proposed that we consider animations not so much as objects (or conversely ideas) but in terms of a
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Tom, thank you for your most intriguing and generous remarks abd ideas. This has been a really productive discussion, and we have already discussed some of these issues in my lab in terns of how we may use our techniques on anime. My PhD student William Huber is focusing on Japanese culture and he knows Japanese, and in fact we already earlier dowloaded a few hundred hours of amine and were planning to work on them anyway. (Currently we are focusing on visualizing patterns across 1.2 Millon Manga pages which cover 912 titles.) Yout point about fans reading animations to focus on visual changes is very important, just as your notes on earlier precedents for aesthetics of total variability in anime. My own examples of this are abstract animations by Fishinger - especially the one where he was modifying a painting over time and exposing one frame after each modification. However, as much as motion graphics today cab be understood as 20th century abstract paintings which came to life, there are also some fundamental differences due to digital technology such as the use of transparency and frequent use of a virtual camera moving through a 3d space. You mention the archive of 100,000 hours of anime - do you mean a particular localized collection which we can actually access and analyze? If yes, what is it? Best lev On Saturday, February 6, 2010, Thomas LaMarre, Prof. thomas.lama...@mcgill.ca wrote: Lev, Thanks for such cogent and insightful presentation of the question of continuous variation in digitally produced images. This is one of the really interesting developments in animation and cinema, and as you've noted elsewhere (if I am not mistaken), it is one that entirely shifts the relation between cinema and animation and even between full and limited animation, in a way that makes animation generally an important paradigm for understanding new media - due the the greater emphasis on what happens to a broad range of elements within the image or in the frame, which leads to transformations in movement between images (at the same time that it is harder to speak of a single discrete space between images in the manner of celluloid filming with snap by snap footage). Two things interest me about how the continuous variation a number of elements in the image impacts designers who are working on films, series and OAVs that are still called animation. First, even though today there is greater control over the variation of a number of elements with digital computers, there are techno-aesthetic precedents within certain lineages of limited animation, which were worked out between interactors (otaku fans) and producers (who were themselves otaku fans), from the late 1960s, but especially in the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, with the introduction of the VCR, 'viewers' transformed into co-producers or co-operators because they began to watch these animations in terms of variations of elements within the image by replaying the animations over and over again, noting how the variation of elements (changes in colour and line) could be 'read' independently of any overall narrative or directorial vision (usually not much in evidence). In fact, this sort of interaction began to take precedence over the modes of perception and interaction that today we tend to attribute to analog media. So, with the development of digital computers , there was not a strong sense of a break but rather a transition that confirmed, reinforced, and extended what was already happening. Many animators avoided the American models for digital animation entirely, seeing them as reactionary throwbacks designed to hide or compensate for continuous variation. I don't think it a coincidence that this happened in the context of large-volume production across a number of small heterogeneous studios in Japan, rather than in the much smaller volume large studio productions typical of North America (although there was always a great deal of interplay between these at some level). I also don't think it a coincidence that it is the same animations that enjoy the greatest transnational popularity, not to mention the greatest presence on line, and go hand in hand with micro-masses (sometimes called fan cultures or subcultures). See Tinami and Wikipedia. In other words, these transformations are worked out not merely at the level of producers making animations to consumers (classical communication/consumption model) but also at the level of socio-aesthetic formations wherein the role of consumer (already reworked socially by shifts in the relation between production and consumption) shifts toward interaction or co-production. The idea of a cooperator in emergence theory probably captures something of this interaction better than terms like co-producer, though. Second, if we take seriously the long history of scientific thinking about, and
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Hi Greg The last line of your post reveals where we differ. You describe the availability of all (or at least many) of our books (whose books?) as an ³information sublime². I could go into a critique here of the sublime, but that isn¹t where the primary difference in our positions is found. It is your use of the word ³information², in this context, that I find problematic. I understand a text (of which a book is an instance) to exist at the point of its being read. I agree with the Derridean assertion that a text exists as an activity, in the process of interpretation. Yes, information can sit on the pages of a book lost on a library shelf waiting to be found or in a forgotten directory on a hard drive (putting aside the idea that the library, computer or network are also all potential texts) but it is in their reading that such information becomes text. However, not all information is text (although some have argued for and revelled in the literary merits of such indexical systems, myself included). Data-mining is one thing, reading another. I have made a number of automatic reading systems (systems that make and then read texts). I didn¹t do this because I thought the algorithm involved was actually reading. It didn¹t enter my mind for a second that a computer programme might be able to apprehend things. Of course not. The computer programme processed the data according to a moderately complex set of rules (grammatic, semantic, semiotic) and in the process exhibited a behaviour that slightly resembled reading. It was, however, very obviously not reading. It is in this failed mimicry that I find the beauty and motivation to make such work. The idea of data-mining is to me of the same ilk. It is a quotidian process that might reveal unexpected (and potentially valuable) patterns in data which we might treat as texts we can read and in the process come to apprehend something. But to confuse the reading with the data-mining is, in my view, dangerous. It reduces both the reader and the text to data and information rather than meaning and becoming. Lev¹s (interesting) piece implicitly did that. Best Simon Simon Biggs s.bi...@eca.ac.uk si...@littlepig.org.uk Skype: simonbiggsuk http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ edinburgh college of art http://www.eca.ac.uk/ Creative Interdisciplinary Research into CoLlaborative Environments http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice http://www.elmcip.net/ From: Gregory Ulmer g...@ufl.edu Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 13:36:35 -0500 To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au, Gregory Ulmer g...@ufl.edu Subject: 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 Edinburgh College of Art (eca
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
/ From: Gregory Ulmer g...@ufl.edu Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Thu, 4 Feb 2010 13:36:35 -0500 To: soft_skinned_space emp...@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au, Gregory Ulmer g...@ufl.edu Subject: 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Very great. Thanks for this too! tl On 04/02/10 1:28 PM, davin heckman davinheck...@gmail.com wrote: 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
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
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)
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Dear Lev Manovich: Many thanks for your fascinating letter and al the links-- an area of Visual Culture that has been until very recently ignored by the American intellectuals--is Visual Poetry-- i will provide some links for this in alter post being prepared--for anyone interested- but for now a book i wd most highly recommend--which ends with a movement towards the cinematic and multi-media--is POETICS AND VISUALITY A TRAJECTORY OF CONTEMPORARY BRAZILIAN POETRY by Philadelpho Menezes, a brilliant artist and theoretician, historian whose life was cut short by a tragic accident-- (San Diego State Universtiy, translated by Harry Polkinhorn--1994) i think you would find much of what you are interested in there, semiotics among others-- also another text is Corrosive Signs Essays on Experimental Poetry (Visual, Concrete, Alternative)--Edited by Cesar Espinosa.Nucelo Post-Arte--translated by Harry Polkinhorn, Maisonneuve Press, 1990 today on line there exits a great deal more writings in sevral languages re Visual Poetry and Mail Art also to some degree as well as Sound Poetry and Visual/Sound works--al of which have been developing in the directions you outline-- i can recommend also two antholiges of critical/theoretical works edited by Richard Kostelanetz--Visual Literature Criticism Precisely 3, 4, 5 and Poetics of the new Poetries, Precisely 13, 14, 15, 16 there is a huge amount of Visual Poetry and Sound Poetry on line--blogs, sites, you tube etc--as well as at the UbuWeb site-- several of these include theoretical and critical writings, manifesti etc-- you might also check out the works of Gerald Janecek such as The Look of Russian Literature and Zaum The Transrational Poetry of Russian futurism also i wd recommend the works of Paul Cirilo re Vision, Speed, disappearance, the military, urbanise, the cinema and new technologies vision such as the drone-- if you are interested, i will quickly assemble a little batch of links for you and others which may prove useful and interesting for your ideas and questions all best to you and everyone-- david baptiste chirot (note a serach of my name--and i am but one of hundreds worldwide-- wil lead you to works of mine in these ares on line including video documentary and synchronized visual/sound poetry perfroamnce--the visual score and sound performance-- On Tue, Feb 2, 2010 at 11:49 PM, Lev Manovich manovich@gmail.comwrote: In the 20th century, intellectuals devoted lots of energy to analyzing lens-based narrative visuals (photography and cinema) and modern non-figurative art. Animation, graphic design, typography, information design, and other areas of visual culture were mostly ignored. in fact, if you are to search for books which theoretically analyze graphics, you will find only a single title published in France in the end of 1960s: Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics (English edition, 1983). In the 1990s, most areas of culture industry switched to software-based production. As a result, graphic design (as well as as other areas of visual culture I listed above) assumed much more central position in contemporary culture. Additionally, visual culture became hybrid. Today, a still design or a moving image sequence now typically combine many previously separate media. Such hybrids are now the norm. A case in point are contemporary motion graphics (commercials, music videos, film and TV titles, and other short forms). They are as prominent today as film and TV narratives - but they cannot be adequately described using the concepts of film theory. Motion graphics typically combine multiple media and techniques (live action video, 2D and 3D animation, typography, effects, compositing, etc.). Instead of being divided into a number of discrete shots, a work often is a single visual flow which constantly changes over time. (For a more detailed analysis, see the chapter After Effects, or How Cinema Became Design in my book Software Takes Command.) Cultural Analytics approach can be used to analyze motion graphics - as well as other areas of contemporary visual culture largely ignored by academic theory. The algorithmic analysis and visualization of how different visual parameters change over time allows us to describe moving images in new ways. We can graph temporal patterns across many visual and semantic parameters, and compare them across different works. Below are links to some results of our explorations into different ways of visualizing temporal changes in motion graphics. http://lab.softwarestudies.com/2008/09/cultural-analytics.html http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157622088848303/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/sets/72157622608431194/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/3180463968/in/set-72157612327742966/
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
Lev, Thanks Lev and Tom for your introductions to your work and the links. I wanted to ask Lev how he felt the data in Cultural Analysis manipulation differed from the concerns of modernist, formalist art criticism where line, value, texture, or color were analyzed? In what ways is the data different and how does the computer manipulation enhance our understanding of say Rothko's work using the first links example. The other thing that popped into my mind was an observation I made a few Sunday afternoons ago. It is not uncommon that the sports networks are on in our home especially during Super Bowl playoff season. NFL Fox football has a moving graphic animation of a he man football robot named Cleatus of all things that is cast off the frame of the playing screen. Cleatus dances, points to interesting items on the screen, and entertains sports enthusiasts reminding me that cultural art theorists may need to investigate contemporary typography and graphics but sex, gender, race and politics desperately needs to be remembered in deconstructing todays popular culture and tv graphics...moving or stil!. What do you think? Can post-modernist theoretical concerns be a part of new design? This is a question that I've been wrestling with in light of curriculum changes within the university where there is a resurgence of interest in graphics, typography and animation. 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
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 Professeur titulaire Études est-asiatiques Communications Université McGill 3434, rue McTavish Montréal, QC H3A 1X9 Canada Tél: 514-398-6756 http://web.me.com/lamarre_mediaken/Site/Home.html On 03/02/10 8:17 AM, Renate Ferro r...@cornell.edu wrote: Lev, Thanks Lev and Tom for your introductions to your work and the links. I wanted to ask Lev how he felt the data in Cultural Analysis manipulation differed from the concerns of modernist, formalist art criticism where line, value, texture, or color were analyzed? In what ways is the data different and how does the computer manipulation enhance our understanding of say Rothko's work using the first links example. The other thing that popped into my mind was an observation I made a few Sunday afternoons ago. It is not uncommon that the sports networks are on in our home especially during Super Bowl playoff season. NFL Fox football has a moving graphic animation of a he man football robot named Cleatus of all things that is cast off the frame of the playing screen. Cleatus dances, points to interesting items on the screen, and entertains sports enthusiasts reminding me that cultural art theorists may need to investigate contemporary typography and graphics but sex, gender, race and politics desperately needs to be remembered in deconstructing todays popular culture and tv graphics...moving or stil!. What do you think? Can post-modernist theoretical concerns be a part of new design? This is a question that I've been wrestling with in light of curriculum changes within the university where there is a resurgence of interest in graphics, typography and animation. 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 ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
There are many ways in which cultural analytics differ from what people call formalist approach, but given the constraints of the post size, let me just point out a couple here. 1. We are now able to visualize - and therefore better understand - gradual changes over time at a number of scales – from a few minute video of a gameplay to a century of film history. Google Earth allows you to navigate space across scales – from the view of the Earth as a whole to a Street View that puts you in a position of a car driver or a passerby looking from a street level. In the same way, we should be able to navigate through time, moving from the scale of a single cultural artifact or its parts (such as a film shot) to the scale of decades and centuries. Visualization of gradual changes in visual and media culture over longer historical periods is an idea that appears to us particularly timely. Humanities disciplines, critics, museums, and other cultural institutions usually present culture in terms of self-contained cultural periods. Similarly, the most influential contemporary theories of history by Kuhn (“scientific paradigms) and Foucault (“epistemes) also focus on stable periods rather than transitions between them. In fact, relatively little intellectual energy has been spent on thinking about how cultural change happens. Perhaps this was appropriate given that, until recently, cultural changes of all kinds were usually very slow. However, since the emergence of globalization in, not only have these changes accelerated worldwide, but the emphasis on continual change rather than on stability has became the key to global business and institutional thinking expressed in the popularity of terms such as “innovation” and “disruptive change.” It is time, therefore, for us to start treating “change” as a basic unit of cultural analysis – rather than limiting ourselves to discrete categories such as to “period,” “school” and “work.” ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
sorry - hit send accidentally before completing my post - here is the right version: -- There are many ways in which cultural analytics differ from what people call formalist approach, but given the constraints of the post size, let me just point out a couple here. 1. We are now able to visualize - and therefore better understand - gradual changes over time at a number of scales – from a few minute video of a gameplay to a century of film history. Google Earth allows you to navigate space across scales – from the view of the Earth as a whole to a Street View that puts you in a position of a car driver or a passerby looking from a street level. In the same way, we should be able to navigate through time, moving from the scale of a single cultural artifact or its parts (such as a film shot) to the scale of decades and centuries. Visualization of gradual changes in visual and media culture over longer historical periods is an idea that appears to us particularly timely. Humanities disciplines, critics, museums, and other cultural institutions usually present culture in terms of self-contained cultural periods. Similarly, the most influential contemporary theories of history by Kuhn (“scientific paradigms) and Foucault (“epistemes) also focus on stable periods rather than transitions between them. In fact, relatively little intellectual energy has been spent on thinking about how cultural change happens. Perhaps this was appropriate given that, until recently, cultural changes of all kinds were usually very slow. However, since the emergence of globalization in, not only have these changes accelerated worldwide, but the emphasis on continual change rather than on stability has became the key to global business and institutional thinking expressed in the popularity of terms such as “innovation” and “disruptive change.” It is time, therefore, for us to start treating “change” as a basic unit of cultural analysis – rather than limiting ourselves to discrete categories such as to “period,” “school” and “work.” Here are couple of examples: http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/4038137889/in/set-72157622525012841/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/3951496507/in/set-72157622525012841/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/3179623793/in/set-72157612327698034/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/3179623621/in/set-72157612327698034/ Thus, if we for instance take the hypothesis that in contemporary anime characters move mush less than in the earlier works, not only we can actually test this hypothesis to see if it true by quantifying and measuring movement but we can also see how this parameter changed over the years across dozens of works. 2. Another crucial advantage of using data analysis and visualization is that now for the first time we can adequately describe many aspects of art and media which previously we could only talk in a very vague way. For instance, for a 100 years filmmakers, animators, critics and theorists talked about movement in films and cartoons. But the natural languages only give a few categories to describe movement - slow, fast and a few others. In other words, natural language map continuous qualities (such as movement) into few discrete categories. Data analysis and visualization give a much better language for describe such continuous qualities. Here are two examples. The first visualizes movement patterns across Vertov film annotated using linguistic categories: http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/4114328078/in/set-72157622608431194/ The second visualization uses measurements of movement - and reveals all kinds of amazing patterns in the film which were hidden when we use natural language to annotate movement: http://www.flickr.com/photos/culturevis/4117658480/in/set-72157622608431194/ ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory
One of the things that interested me about these models was the possibility to see the analytics as a kind of animation, or if you will, as a remediation of one medium by another. This does present a challenge for how we think about empirical analysis. Since the analytics stick close to the medium under analysis, the very status of the model seems to undergo a transformation. As if this weren't a model but a conversion or a translation or remediation. Yet I had some concerns about how we approach this empiricism, for I think, in a very positive view, that this is empiricism. But it is hard to keep empiricism from turning into positivism without some questions about the process. So, on the one hand, I truly appreciate these modes of visualization for allowing a kind of empirical analytics of movement and change. They promise a great deal of sophistication and insight, especially for isolated films or collections of films. But on the other hand I am less certain about how this analytics operates at the level of decades and centuries. For instance, if we are going to analyze a century of film in this manner, how do we decide what is a representative sample? Given that so many films are not extant, will this affect the analytics? With Japanese films, for instance, due to the firebombing of Tokyo, there aren't many prewar films today. But what kind of analytics of a century of film could omit those films? Also, would home movies be included, or is it only feature films? But then, what of contexts where film wasn't primarily a matter of feature films? I had similar doubts in the context of animation. While I think it would be completely appropriate and useful to analyze 'slow' and 'fast' in this way, I wonder again how we would establish the parameters for the sample when doing comparisons or histories. What are the material limits? This does have implications for history. I am totally in agreement that 'epochal thinking' - based on simple historical periodization - is a dead end. But there are a lot of ways of thinking history that are not based on epochal thinking and periodization. Foucault himself immediately retracted the term 'episteme' and gradually showed that there are different kinds of transformation underway at any one moment; he rejected that idea that disciplinary society follows sovereign society, etc. Raymond Williams spoke of dominants, and Althusser of overdetermination to acknowledge the heterogenity of any historical formation. These are very different ways of thinking history, none of them dependent on epochal thinking. The idea of tracing gradual change historically I find appealing, but still I have to wonder about the boundaries or limits of the analytics when we're talking about decades or histories. Is this a history of gradual change across the world? Or is this another way of doing history of the West or of nations? In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari present a model for thinking about continuity and process by way of three syntheses - connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive. Maybe this is one way of taking into account the kinds of gradual continuous change that are now possible to measure with these visual analytics while acknowledging processes of disjunction, as well as another register of conjunction as well. Just some thoughts. On 03/02/10 12:01 PM, Lev Manovich manovich@gmail.com wrote: sorry - hit send accidentally before completing my post - here is the right version: -- There are many ways in which cultural analytics differ from what people call formalist approach, but given the constraints of the post size, let me just point out a couple here. 1. We are now able to visualize - and therefore better understand - gradual changes over time at a number of scales - from a few minute video of a gameplay to a century of film history. Google Earth allows you to navigate space across scales - from the view of the Earth as a whole to a Street View that puts you in a position of a car driver or a passerby looking from a street level. In the same way, we should be able to navigate through time, moving from the scale of a single cultural artifact or its parts (such as a film shot) to the scale of decades and centuries. Visualization of gradual changes in visual and media culture over longer historical periods is an idea that appears to us particularly timely. Humanities disciplines, critics, museums, and other cultural institutions usually present culture in terms of self-contained cultural periods. Similarly, the most influential contemporary theories of history by Kuhn (scientific paradigms) and Foucault (epistemes) also focus on stable periods rather than transitions between them. In fact, relatively little intellectual energy has been spent on thinking about how cultural change happens. Perhaps this was appropriate given that,
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, whether typical subjects of inquiry in the physical sciences might benefit from qualitative analysis? If so, it is possible that these questions are already being addressed (eg: Latour, Law, Biagioli, etc, have all written extensively on this). However, whilst I think these are all interesting questions they are definitely not on the current topic (animation). I don¹t want to distract the list from the topic so we might want to tag this subject for later discussion. 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. 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: Lev Manovich manovich@gmail.com Reply-To: soft_skinned_space empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Date: Tue, 2 Feb 2010 23:49:32 -0800 To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Subject: [-empyre-] visualization as the new language of theory In the 20th century, intellectuals devoted lots of energy to analyzing lens-based narrative visuals (photography and cinema) and modern non-figurative art. Animation, graphic design, typography, information design, and other areas of visual culture were mostly ignored. in fact, if you are to search for books which theoretically analyze graphics, you will find only a single title published in France in the end of 1960s: Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics (English edition, 1983). In the 1990s, most areas of culture industry switched to software-based production. As a result, graphic design (as well as as other areas of visual culture I listed above) assumed much more central position in contemporary culture. Additionally, visual culture became hybrid. Today, a still design or a moving image sequence now typically
