Uncreative Writing Kenneth Goldsmith

P.25 (n)ever before has language had so much materiality--- fluidity, plasticity, malleability-- begging to be actively managed by the writer. Before digital language, words were almost always found imprisoned on a page. How different today when digitized language can be poured into any conceivable container: text typed into a Microsoft Word document can be parsed into a database, visually morphed in Photoshop, animated in Flash, pumped into online text-mangling engines, spammed to thousands of e-mail addresses, and imported into a sound editing program and spit out as music. The possibilities are endless.

Excommunication: Three Inquiries in Media and Mediation (Alexander Galloway, Eugene Thacker, McKenzie Wark)

P. 80  excommunication is a double movement in which the communicational imperative is expressed, and expressed as the impossibility of communication.

p. 84-85 about Georges Méliès     "the machine that shows us more truth than we are prepared to see, the magic that calls up forces beyond human comprehension, or the everyday apprehension of an invisible nexus of causality, behind the veil of what can be seen and heard and felt. Méliès's 'horror' films are not only pedagogical moments of mediation, but they also point to the shadowy absence at the core of all mediation. In any given moment of mediation, there is always a minimal separation, a differential, a gap, lacuna, or fissure… a blind spot. "
"The fantastical element of Méliès's films is to be able to see what media and mediation usually don't make visible --- that is why Méliès's films are about film, and more broadly, about technological mediation. But it is, of course, only through the medium and its 'special effects' that one can gain a glimpse of what is not mediated."

p. 89 The pioneers of modern cybernetics and information theory.. presume some minimum ground of mediation as the basis for any possible communication. In the Shannon diagram, a starting presupposition is the interplay of identity and difference…. The individuation of "point A" is dependent on its separation from a "point B" with which it is communicating, and in fact the possibly of connecting points A and B relies on this notion of a prior separation--- the conditions of connection relying on a prior state of disconnection.

p.95  (after discussing J-horror)   Media shift from the connection of two points in a single reality, to an enigmatic and ambivalent connection with an unnamed "beyond."

p. 102   In the horror genre, what we witness is an evocative concept of the supernatural as itself mediated, often through objects that are at once overly familiar and highly technical, objects are everyday and opaque at the same time.

p115  for every object there is an inaccessible more-than-object.

object vs thing
p. 119  If objects are always objects for a subject, then things are like impossible objects, occult objects, or better, apophatic objects --- objects abosolutely withdrawn, leaving only a strange, fecund emptiness,  an inaccessibility that knows no limits.

p.131 with haunted media, the "divine object" establishes a connection between two different ontological orders (natural-supernatural, earthly-divine, life- afterlife). This is quite different in principle from the modern view of mediation given by cybernetics and information theory. There one has a mediation between two points within a single, shared, consensual reality.


Erik Davis    TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information ()1998

Tom Gunning    "To Scan a Ghost: An Ontology of Mediated Vision," Grey Room 26 (2007)

Joe Milutis     Ether: The nothing that connects everything

Siegfried Zieklinsk     Deep Time of he Media: Toward an Archaeology of Seeing and Hearing by Technical Means

Extreme Asia: the rise of cult cinema from the far east (Daniel Martin) 2015

cites others: "genres are not defined by a feature that makes all films of a certain type fundamentally similar; rather, they are produced by the discourses through which film are understood." p11-12

as the Asia Extreme case studies demonstrate, a film can have the label 'cult' thrust upon it purely as a result of carefully planned marketing campaigns and skillfully judged interactions between the distribution company and the mainstream press.  p.13


Mark Jancovich, "Cult Fictions: Cult Movies, Subcultural capital and the production of cultural distinctions," cultural studies, 16:2 (2002)
                            "Genre and the audience: Genre classifications and cultural distinctions in the mediation of The Silence of the Lamb," in Horror: The film Reader (Routledge, 2002)

bodies in code (Mark Hansen)

p21 "originary technical basis of embodied experience"


the reimagining  of VR as a mixed reality differs from earlier concept of virtual reality
1) representionism vs  perceptuomotor activity
   
p.4 representationist fantasy
     such a break (with natural perception) "grants cinema the capacity to present the world from a nonhuman perspective and thus opens a properly autonomous machinism; by contrast, the functional homology linking virtual reality technologies with natural perception supports a prosthetics that functions to expand the scope of natural perception, to tap the technics at its core. "
p5 "Bluntly put, the new mixed reality paradigm foregrounds the constitutive or ontological role of the body in giving birth to the world."

P. 21 this is largely responsible for the promise of the digital, understood not as some autonomous moment in the history of technology, but rather, first and foremost, as a stage in the ongoing technogenesis of the human.

2） ocular-centered vs tactile

Media Technologies: Essays on communication, materiality and society

Fred Turner's summary of several essays

people understand digital culture in terms of bits      (manovich, henry Jenkins, lawrence Lessig   bits can be copied infinitely without loss to the original )

The Relevance of Algorithms    Tarleton Gillespie
Gillespie points out that scholars, pundits, and everyday users tend to take a certain pleasure in the fact that algorithms act on their own, as pieces of science and technology, ad so seem to stand outside and even beyond ordinary politics.
In the digital era, .. it involves interrogating algorithms--- first by denying that they are apolitical, and second, by seeking out the ideals they encode and the communities that benefit from those ideals.

Making Media Work          Greg Downey
But Downey reminds us, these new regimes of production have been built and continue to function on the back of an industrial infrastructure --- an infrastructure that continues to depend on and replicate the class hierarchies of the industrial era.
In short, Downey reminds us that despite two decades of claims to the contrary, information technology does not free us from the politics of labor as we knew them in the 19th century. They shift them, reconfigure them a bit, but they hardly do away with class, with the overworking of some bodies for the profit of others, and with the fact that factories, social or mechanical, never run without workers.

(Downey    closed captioning: subtitling, stenography, and the digital convergence of text with television, 2008       Telegraph Messenger Boys: labor, technology, and geography, 1850-1950)


Repairing Repair    Steven J. Jackson
Jackson advocates that we adopt what he calls "broken world thinking."

To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World (Vincent Mosco)

P19
When economist Dallas Smythe and Herbert Schiller bagan to turn their attention to communication in the 1950s and '60s, they drew connections between their new filed of study and the resources, like agriculture and oil, that had occupied economists for many years (Mosco 2009, 82-89).
(The Political Economy of Communication)

Around this time the computer scientist turned public-policy analyst Anthony Oettinger developed a general resource theory that linked energy and materials to information, and it became the conceptual foundation for the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy, which Oettinger chaired for several decades. When the communication scholar Marc Uri Porat (1977) published his influential map of the shift to an economy powered by information workers, it became time to think about an information economy.
(Porat, Marc Uri. 1977. The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement. Office of Telecommunications Special Publication 77-12, May. Washington. DC: US Department of Commerce)

Videotex--- P. 21   This was a computer-based service that delivered information from a central facility to users at terminals in their homes, in public places, and to a lesser degree, in business. Users were able to interact with the service by making specific information requests.
…
Videotex held great promise as report after report predicted major transformations in every aspect of life,…
(Tydeman, John, Hubert Lipinskim, Richard P. Adler….. 1982   Teletext and videotex in the United States     New York: McGrawHill.)

Cybernetics in the Soviet Union
for economic planning and control
Gerovitch, Slava. 2010. "The cybernetic scare and the origins of the internet"    Baltic worlds  (online resources)
Spufford, Francis. 2010. Red Plenty.  London: Faber and Faber

The Computer Utility comes to Chile (25-29)

p. 180-182
four elements of big data
1) the data under analysis are invariably quantitative in that operations are applied to numerical values of objects, events, outcomes, ideas, opinions, etc.
2) big data develops generalization based on correlations among variables.    a growing respect for correlations rather than a continuing quest for elusive causality.
3) tends to be theoretical
4) primary goal of big data is to be predictive

sound design and science fiction

chapter 7     emotional intensity    over  narrative coherence

p.140   "Foley sound"--- those sound effects that are created in synchronization with the projected image during sound postproduction.


Chapter 6 surround sound

p117 Dolby     noise reduction
 118-119   "realism"?
119   Dolby Stereo surround sound is not meant to heighten realism at all, but just the opposite, to denounce it.
p122   the use of surround sound offers a total sonic environment, which masks the real environment of the theatre space to create a sonic space with no entry and no exit.

Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Mark Kerins)

P33   Dolby stereo… represented a significant improvement over the status quo: if offered cinema improved dynamic and frequency ranges and "cleaner" sound --- capabilities further enhanced in the 1980s by Dolby SR, which applied improved noise reduction techniques to the Dolby Stereo matrix.

p34   As Tomlinson Holman notes in his book 5.1 {channel  my correction}Surround Sound: Up and Running, Dolby Stereo's "dynamic range and difficulties with recording for the matrix make this format seem rather prematurely grey." Holman lists numerous problems with the matrix, including the level imbalances anywhere in the signal path would significantly skew the whole soundfield; that the matrix decoders often steered sounds to the wrong speakers when multiple sound sources were present at once; and that the width of the perceived sound field behind the screen varied depending on whether dialogue was present or not.

p.58  In the film world, analog optical sound-on-film systems like Dolby SR and Dolby Stereo are noisy enough that their intrinsic noise is audible, as a background hiss, in a soundtrack's quiet moments.

 P. 85   Chion   "superfield"
Zizek "it is now that soundtrack that functions as the elementary 'frame of reference' enabling us to orient ourselves in the diegetic space." --87
p. 87   Chion finds that "Dolby multitrack has naturally favored the development of passive offscreen space over active"
dolby stereo sound trace replaces the establishing shot ----P88 "multiple images have supplanted  the wide, all-encompasing establishing shot of previous eras, with each individual shot offering only a fraction of the information the absent maser shot would have"

editing suggestions

recent scholarship, by scholars such as: Dong Limin in 2013; Gail Hershatter in 2007 and 20ll, respectively; Wang Lingzhen in 2013; Wang Zheng in 2005; and Zong and Wang et al., in 2001, urge a reconsideration of 

helps reclaim the unrealized potential of socialist imaginations (not "recuperate")  or recapture

in the  early twentieth century China 
in the early twentieth century Shanghai 

The film draws on the notion of retribution