the discrete image

Echographies of Television: filmed interviews (Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler) translated by Jennifer Bajorek
(Cambridge, UK: polity Press) 2002

The Discrete Image (Bernard Stiegler) 147-163
p155-156
The continuity of the analog image is a reality effect which ought not to conceal the fact that the the analog image is always already discrete. Not simply because it is composed of atomic grains, but because it is subject to framing operations and choices about depth of field, because it has its reality effect according to the photographic and literal context in which it is inserted, etc. ...
This can of course be seen more clearly in the animated image,in which a plurality of discontinuous images are sequentially connected, the art of the director and of the editor consisting in effacing this discontinuity (in occulting it) by playing with it . By utilizing the discontinuity of the image, they put continuity to work on the side of the spectatorial synthesis, which is what, for example, the belief that this was is.... The artist's job is to assemble the analytic elements such that the synthesis will be made more effectively.
...
The image is always discrete, but it is always discrete, as it were, as discreetly as possible. If it were discrete indiscreetly (shamelessly as it were), its discreteness would have no effect on us.

p157-158
This new cognizance [connaissance] stands in sharp relief against the background of the prior and intuitive knowledge I have of analog this was, as well as of the analogico-digital "perhaps this was not." This belief and incredulity are nothing other than the synthesis effected by the spectator, who internationalizes the spectrum as having been. By discretizing the continuous, digitization allows us to submit the this was to a decomposing analysis. Essentially synthetic (for example, in the spontaneous synthesis of the this was), the spectator's relation to the image thus becomes an analytic relation as well.
p158
We must in fact take two syntheses into account: one corresponds to the technical artifact in general, the other to the activity of the subject "spontaneously" producing its "mental images." However, Barthes shows perfectly well that it is the technological synthesis effected by the machine (the camera) that makes the intentional synthesis possible, that is to say, the belief in the this was.
p159 The analogico-digital technology of images (just like that of sounds) opens the epoch of the analytic apprehension of the image-object.

P161 -162
The analysis I've proposed, of the two syntheses (spectator and camera), such as they can never be separated from each other, signifies that the evolution of the technical synthesis implies the evolution of the spectatorial synthesis. Both syntheses are actually constituted in the course of what Simondon called a transductive relation (a relation which constitutes its terms, in which one term cannot precede the other because they exist only in relation). That is to say, new image-objects are going to engender new mental images, as well as another intelligence of movement, for it is essentially a question of animated images. The intelligence I'm talking about here is not the intelligence of what I called the new knowledge of the image. It designates techno-intuitive knowledges -- intensions in the Barthesian sense- of the new kind, which will of course be, moreover, affected or able to be affected by new knowledge, and that's opportunity.

P163 rethink what Hollywod has up to this point done in the domain of the culture industry
For it has done in accordance with a reifying schema, and by opposing production to consumption, that is to say: by putting analysis on one side (production) and synthesis on the other (consumption).

the routledge companion to science fiction

"posthumanism and cyborg theory" veronica Hollinger 267-278
269-270
As a cultural signifier, "posthuman" faces in a number of diverse directions. Following Lyotard, for example, Neil Badmington understands it as a perspective from which(philosophical) humanism can question itself, arguing that "the'post' of post humanism does not (and , moreover, cannot) mark or make an absolute break from the legacy of humanism," which is, in the final analysis, what makes us "us". For neo-Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, "posthuman" might identify a new kind of embodied subjectivity resistant to the operations of global biopower. Judith Halberstam and Ira Lingston find "posthuman" less useful as a chronological marker than as a (non) identity category that, like the category of "queer" in analyses of human sexual identities, can fold into itself a wide range of potential significations, including bodies that are redolent of difference and perversity.

The discourse of cultural theory and of sf are ineluctably entwined here. In Hayles' words, "Embedding ideas and artifacts in the situated specificities of narrative, the literary texts give these ideas and artifacts a local habitation and a name through discursive formulations whose effects are specific to that textual body " (Hayles 1999: 22). Recalling the historical defamiliarization that marks the conclusion of Foucault's work(1973), I want to suggest that one history of sf is the story of the end of "Man" as the unique human(ist) subject. Many sf stories, whatever else they are about, are also about the uncanny process of denaturalization through which we come to experience ourselves as subjects-in-technoculture.

the routledge companion to science fiction

ed. Mark bould, Andrew M butler, Adam Roberts, and Sherry vint
London and New York: Routledge 2009


1. "design for screen sf" piers D. Britton 341-349
Two distinctive phases are identifiable. From the 1920s to the late 1960s, most definers leaned heavily upon modernist architectural and industrial design, above all in the idioms which emanated from the Bauhaus and the work of Le Corbusier. Sleek, streamlined forms, generally simple in profile and smooth in contour, and either shiny metallic or near-white were the norm: examples include Everytown in Things to come (Menzies 1936), the luna rocket in Destination Moon (Pichel 1950), and the Martian travel machines in War of the Worlds (Haskin 1953).

After 1970... confidence in the ideals of modernization and modernism was showing definite signs of disintegration, which began to express itself in contemporary architecture, industrial design, and fashion. Brutalist architects experimented with rough-hewn rather than smooth surfaces, while some mainstream early 1970s clothing, furnishing, and textile design had absorbed the "shaggy," ethnic-oriented tastes of the countercultural hippies.
Star wars IV and blade runner ... often vistas of technology which combine gargantuan scale and power with a clear sense of the intricacy and untidiness of real-world spaces and artifacts.
the smog, floodlights, besmirched chimneys and gantries of contemporary heavy industry are amp flied a thousand-fold in the aerial shot of the hellish 2019 Los Angeles in Blade runner.
star wars are groundbreaking also for the sheer destiny of "lived-in" realism... the surfaces of buildings, vehicles, machinery, and robots are scratched, oil-smeared and scorched; clothing and battle armor look used and scuffed rather than pristine; and the action periodically moves through spectacularly grim, disorderly environments, including a traveling scrapyard and a garbage sump. Star War's aesthetic evokes the mixture of flyblown shabbiness and dustily expansive natural grandeur which John Ford, Sergio Leone, ad Henry Hathaway had rendered so picturesque in their Technicolor westerns.


2."Music" Ken McLeod
Philip Hayward (2004) off the planet: music, sound and science fiction cinema
Eshun, kodwo (1998) More brilliant than the sun: adventures in sonic fiction
Jeremy Gilbert and Ewan Pearson (1999) Discographies: dance music, culture and the politics of sound
Timothy Taylor (2001) Strange sounds: music technology and culture

3.science studies sheerly vint
studies of "technoculture" focus on the social and ethical consequences of scientific "discoveries" and technological creations.

bruno latour
Luckhurst, R. 2002 The invention of telepathy, 1870-1901
2006 science fiction studies33(1)-- latour, castells, kilter into dialogue with Martin Willis
Martin Willis 2006 Mesmerists, monsters and machines: science fiction and the culture of science in the nineteenth century

theoreis and practices of digitextuality

1"The Poetics of augmented space"
virtual space vs augmented space A typical VR system presents a user with a virtual space that has nothing to do with the immediate physical space of the usuer; in contrast, a typical AR system adds the information directly related to this immediate physical space. but we don't necessaily have to think of immersion into the virtual and augumentation of the physical as the opposites.

p76 if video and other types of surveillance technologies translate the physical space and its dwellers into data, cellspace technologies work in the opposite direction:delivering data to mobile-space dwellers. cellspace is physical space filled with data that can be retrieved by a user using a personal communication device.

p77 It also makes sense to bring together the surveillance/monitoring of space and its dwellers, and the augmentation of space with additional data, because these two functions often go hand in hand. For instance, by knowing the location of a person equipped with a cell phone, particular information relevant to this location can be sent to this cell phone.... This close connection between surveillance and assistance is one of the key characteristics of high-tech society. This is how these technologies are made to work, and this is why I am discussing data flows from the space(surveillance, monitoring, tracking) and into the space (cellspace application, computer screens, and other examples, below) together.

robert Venturi Iconography and Electronics upon a Generic Architecture: a view from the drafting room (MIT 1996)
complexity and contradiction in architecture
Learning from Las Vegas

2 "space invaders" peter lunenfeld

http://www.peterlunenfeld.com/about/
"snap to grid: A user's guide to digital arts, media and culture"
"The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine" came out from the MIT Press in May, 2011

todd Gitlin The sixities: years of hope, days of rage
George Katsiaficas the imagination of the new left: a global analysis of 1968
Andrew Feenberg and Jim Freedman when poetry ruled the street: the french may events of 1968

New Media: Theories and practices of digitextuality

ed by Anna Everett& John T. Cardwell 2003 New York and London: routledge

1."digitextuality and click theory: theses on convergence media in the digital age"
(pp3-28)

while glance theory denigrates "television based on the viewer's 'fundamental inattentiveness'", user practices of digitexutality,especiallyas practiced by that generation who have grown up with computer games, MTV-style television aesthetics, and the Internet, suggest an alternative.--- fundamental hyperattentiveness
pixilated gaze or hyperatttentive theory of spectatorship)
(glance theory - John T. Caldwell: Television,: style, crisis,and authority in American television)

I argue click theory's lure of sensory plentitude functions to affirm Lyotard's idea of our "faith in the inexhaustibility of the perceivable." In other words, by clicking on websites' embedded hotlinks we are instantly transported to other data fields within the site or to separate websites linked to the primary one.

2. "Invisible media" (Laurau Marks pp33-45)
p42 I've given several examples of ways that temporarily autonomous media can mimic the invisible process of information capitalism in order to render its strategies material, and to make manifest things that information capital would like to keep buried.
enfolding(implicate)vs unfolding(explicate)
war and invisibility -- the invisibility of the Persian Gulf War-- Paul Virilio "My kingdom for a Horse:the revolutions of speed" Queen's Quarterly 108. no.3 (2002)

TAZ (temporary autonomous zone)-- T.A.Z. the temporary autonomous zone: ontological Anarchy, poetic terrism (brooklyn, NY:autonomedia 1991)