Technologies of History
My book manuscript Technologies of History: Film, TV, Digital Media, and the Eccentricity of the Past is currently under contract for publication in fall 2010 with the University Press of New England. The book examines alternative forms of visual history as constructed through film, television and digital media over the past 30 years. Integrating theory, historical research and textual criticism, I explore issues of cultural memory, textuality and the impact of digital technologies on our understanding of the past, focusing on works that challenge the conventions and forms of traditional historiography. My goal is to broadly reconsider the range of practices that should be regarded as visual history, drawing special attention to voices and forms of practice that have been left out of mainstream historical discourse. Overall, I argue that the primary aspirations of visual history need not be limited to the production of illusionist narratives but may include the creation of new critical contexts in which viewers simultaneously interrogate the past and rethink the entangled relations of history, memory and media. As an intervention in prevailing discourses of media and history, my aim is to rethink our fundamental relationship to history in response to a diverse and rapidly evolving media landscape that includes online video, science fiction, games and digital networks.
In conjunction with the book, I have also created a rich-media interactive history project of the same title that expands upon a single case study drawn from the book. This project allows for an in-depth exploration of the extraordinary diverse ways the John F. Kennedy assassination has been mediated and reinterpreted, ranging from the Zapruder footage to machinima videos captured from the game JFK Reloaded. For me, these two projects represents an ideal conjunction of scholarly modes, with the book allowing for the in-depth development of a more or less conventional academic argument in linear form. However, the project examines a genuinely diverse range of media texts, so that no reader could reasonably be expected to be familiar with all of the objects under examination. By creating a digital companion to the written text, I was able to perform a different kind of textual analysis, not simply through illustration of examples but by juxtaposing different threads of the argument with related media clips. The experience of navigating this database of critical and mediated works allows the user to experience the argument from multiple perspectives and in varying degrees of specificity.
Editorial: Vectors
My long-term commitment to creating and facilitating work that takes advantage of new venues for scholarly practice may be seen in my work as Co-Editor of Vectors Journal of Culture and Technology in a Dynamic Vernacular. Working closely with my Co-Editor Tara McPherson, I helped to conceive and found the journal, which launched its inaugural issue on the theme of Evidence in spring 2004. Vectors has published five subsequent issues devoted to themes of Mobility, Ephemera, Perception, Difference and Memory, which have received wide acclaim from an international, interdisciplinary readership. In addition to producing innovative scholarship that is designed to cut across traditional disciplinary boundaries, Vectors is explicitly devoted to helping establish the viability of emerging forms of electronic publication. In my position as Co-Editor, I work closely with designers and contributing scholars to oversee the production – ranging from the selection of open call proposals through peer-review – of four interactive multimedia projects per year. This experience has been enormously instructive and has convinced me of the importance of promoting and challenging the paradigm shifts currently under way in electronic publication.
On a personal level, Vectors has also provided me a remarkable opportunity to collaborate with international scholars, artists and designers from very diverse backgrounds and disciplines. Among the projects I have edited are Jennifer Terry’s Killer Entertainments (Fall 2007), Minoo Moallem’s Nation on the Move (Fall 2007), Anne Friedberg’s The Virtual Window Interactive (Spring 2007), Perry Hoberman and Donald Hoffman’s Malperception (Spring 2007), Trevor Paglen’s Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies (Spring 2007), Melanie Swalwell’s Cast-Offs From the Golden Age (Spring 2006), Julian Bleecker’s Wifi.Bedouin (Fall 2005) and Rebecca Emigh’s The Unmaking of Markets (Spring 2004). These works range from a study of economic development in 15th century Tuscany to a history of the video game industry in New Zealand. The scholars I have worked with come from fields as diverse as Sociology, Cognitive Psychology, Media Studies, Fine Arts, Engineering and Cultural Geography. As I was completing my own project for the Memory issue, I was struck by the extent to which my own thinking about scholarly practice has been forever transformed by the collision of research, design, art and communication that Vectors represents.
Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History
This chapter examines the impact of digital technologies on the writing of history, arguing that the narrative logics of the database and search engine have resulted in two divergent movements – one that seeks to articulate a “total” history that is encyclopedic in scope and rooted in relatively stable conceptions of historical epistemology; another that exploits digital technology’s potential for randomization and recombination in order to accommodate increasingly volatile visions of the past. At the opposing ends of this spectrum are the Shoah Foundation’s Survivors Project, a randomly accessible archive of over 100,000 hours of video testimonies by Holocaust survivors, and the Recombinant History Project’s Terminal Time, an artificial intelligence apparatus that constructs infinitely variable historical documentaries based on audience biases and beliefs. Although these two projects represent competing conceptions of historiography, both are enabled by the proliferation of digital information systems.
This book chapter is forthcoming in Interactive Frictions, edited by Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson (University of California Press).
Download “Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History”
Regeneration: Multimedia Genres and Emerging Scholarship
This article presents an initial taxonomy of generic strategies and conventions that have emerged from the past ten years of practice-based research in multimedia pedagogy at USC’s Institute for Multimedia Literacy. These genres emerged organically across a wide variety of courses and disciplines at IML and have subsequently been incorporated into the curriculum of the undergraduate Honors in Multimedia Scholarship program. The taxonomy begins with a more detailed description of the five genres that have been deployed most frequently in the IML’s programs, followed by brief outlines of additional genres and their potential for deployment across a range of disciplinary contexts.
This article is forthcoming in Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory Vol. 20, November 2009 and will be published in conjunction with a dialogue between Steve Anderson and Stuart Moulthrop.
Download “Regeneration: Multimedia Genres and Emerging Scholarship”
Aporias of the Digital Avant-Garde
Abstract:
This article maps two divergent trajectories within a narrowly defined sphere of short-form, time-based digital media created between 1995 and 2005. These works are considered in relation to the historical avant-garde – particularly the Structural film movement of the 1960s and 70s – and analyzed as responses to a range of cultural concerns specific to the digital age. The analysis identifies movement toward two terminal points: first, a mode of remix-based montage inspired by open source programming communities and peer-to-peer networks; and second, the emergence of a mode of imaging termed the “digital analogue”, which foregrounds the material basis of digital production.
Published in Digital Humanities Quarterly vol 1, no 2 Summer 2007
Download “Aporias of the Digital Avant-Garde”
A Pedagogy for Original Synners
What will the class of 2020 expect when we (the teachers) meet them for the first time? What should we expect of them? This chapter uses the science fictional device of a time-traveling machine to frame these questions. The aim is to provide a context for examining currently under-recognized styles of learning emerging from contemporary game and remix cultures. We will examine a range of educational practices and suggest three key elements that support learning as a process of critical and creative synthesis: 1) open source scholarship, 2) social networking and 3) youth as cultural mediators.
Written with Anne Balsamo.
Published in Digital Youth, Innovation, and the Unexpected edited by Tara McPherson for the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Learning (MIT Press 2007)
The Past in Ruins: Postmodern Politics and the Fake History Film
It is a truism of postmodern culture that the difference between truth and fiction is not what it used to be. But in Jesse Lerner’s Ruins, this is more than an empty slogan, it’s a point of departure. Ruins is a self-proclaimed “fake documentary” that exposes the persistence of colonialist ideology in pre-hispanic histories of Mexico and calls into question the processes by which the disciplines of archaeology and art history are constituted. In Ruins, Lerner is as much concerned with historiography – the processes of writing history – as with history itself. The film mobilizes a multiplicity of historiographical and documentary strategies, ranging from archival footage compilation and hidden camera interviews to cutout animation and fictional recreation. Ruins puts forward a scathing revelation of the racist and colonialist underpinnings of ancient Mesoamerican history and offers in its place an enlightened critique and alternate vision of the region’s past.
Published in F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, edited by Alex Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (University of Minnesota Press 2006)
Download “The Past In Ruins: Postmodern Politics and the Fake History Film”
History TV and Popular Memory
“A remarkable and misguided consensus exists among both historians and media critics regarding television’s unsuitability for the construction of history. Notwithstanding The History Channel’s promise to provide access to “All of History – All in One Place,” television viewers are often characterized as victims in an epidemic of cultural amnesia for which television is both disease and carrier. TV, so the argument goes, can produce no lasting sense of history; at worst, it actually impedes viewers’ ability to receive, process, or remember information about the past.”
This essay examines an array of television shows, ranging from Star Trek and Quantum Leap to Meeting of Minds and You Are There, to argue against prevailing assumptions about TV and history and the culture of amnesia that television is supposed to produce.
Introduction to Memory issue of Vectors
We stand, as always, on the brink of history: an African-American president-elect, an economy suffering the most precipitous free-fall since the Great Depression, a war in Iraq that shows no signs of abating – all historic events, to be sure. The question is not whether they will they be remembered, but how and by whom. Too often memory is conceived in binary terms that obscure its entangled relationship to social and cultural practices. In truth, memory is in a constant state of flux and contestation, continually being rescripted and regenerated to conform to the needs of any given present. Indeed, it would not be too much to argue that memory is what is at stake in the writing of history. As Michael Frisch claimed, “What matters is not so much the history that is placed before us, but rather what we are able to remember and what role that knowledge plays in our lives.” Yet memory continues to occupy a marginal space, somewhere between an evil twin and a neglected stepchild, in relation to History proper.
It has been nearly twenty years since Ronald Reagan delivered his farewell address to the nation after two terms in office. In his speech, Reagan warned against losing our collective memory, and with it, our sense of national identity. “If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit.” Reagan’s call for national pride and unity seemed anachronistic even 20 years ago but he pulled it off with an avuncular wink that would have been unimaginable from any of his successors. The world seemed closer to apocalypse in those days but it’s hard not to look around and feel that things are so very much worse now.
Like our own century’s George Bush, Reagan’s immediate successor had been in office only a short time when the bombardment of Iraq began. The elder Bush characterized the war in terms of healing the national psyche, “By God, we are going to kick the Vietnam syndrome once and for all.” By “Vietnam Syndrome,” he meant the nation’s aversion to wars in far-off lands with dubious goals and no viable exit strategy, not the human toll of post-traumatic stress taken on a generation of this nation’s youth. Of course, the first Gulf War resulted in its own syndrome, a combination of chronic fatigue, loss of muscle control, headaches, dizziness, and yes, memory loss. As the death toll continues to rise in Iraq, the illusion that we are simply watching a more expensive but less competently produced sequel have given way to painful reminders of Vietnam. The mendacious revenge narrative of 9/11, it seems, has finally worn thin. The war in Iraq has brought the Vietnam syndrome full-circle as those memories “lost” in the first Gulf War come back to the surface with a vengeance. A lesson, perhaps, that is worth remembering.
This issue of Vectors spins uneasily around the conjoined axis of memory and history without attempting the impossible – and arguably undesirable – task of reconciling the two. What draws the projects in this issue together is the interplay between objects of study that are both concrete and ephemeral and investigations that bleed across disciplinary bounds to explore the relevance of memory to questions of time, media, narrative, politics and space. More so than for many Vectors themes, Memory seems to have inspired a range of formal and methodological experiments that stretch our comfortable definitions of scholarly practice. This issue of the journal also includes a final project designed by Vectors‘ longtime Creative Director, Raegan Kelly, who worked with Mark Hansen on shi jian: time. Her very first project for Vectors was Alice Gambrell’s Stolen Time Archive, a prototype that that sought to prove the concept behind Vectors, and which has rarely been surpassed as an exemplar of what we hope to achieve in terms of depth, nuance and genuine collaboration between designer and scholar. Throughout her five-year association with Vectors, Raegan brought passion, intellect and rigor to every aspect of the design process. Her influence on Vectors has been incalculable and we will miss her in ways we do not yet even realize.
In a few weeks, another transition will happen in this country and with it, a new set of historical narratives will be written; memories will be conjured, contested, scripted and contained. Personal memories will grow entangled with cultural ones and the past will increasingly seem to explain the inevitability of the present. We will remind our now three-year-old daughter that the first time she watched television was the live broadcast of Obama’s acceptance speech. No matter how clearly etched this moment may be in her mind, it is not the event itself she will remember, but our retelling of it, inextricably woven with her own imagination and the narratives of anticipation – dare I say hope? – that we invest in a future that has the decency, at least for the moment, to be not yet written.
Introduction to Ephemera issue of Vectors
The images and sounds that pervade our world, indeed the excited electrons that illuminate this screen are, by definition, evanescent — we perceive and make meaning from them in fractions of a second before they flicker, fade or are replaced. Likewise the computer you are now using will one day crash or become obsolete, perhaps taking its prodigious memory with it, an eventuality that suggests the alarming impermanence of digital media while it hints mischievously at our own mortality. There is very little in today’s culture — except perhaps for the copyright of Disney characters — that can be counted on to survive the 21st century. Indeed, those of us who study the artifacts and stories of cultural and artistic production may be in the midst of a new dark age, inundated with such a profusion of information that we can never hope to organize or digest it, much less sensibly preserve it for the future.
But there is something more at stake here than the planned obsolescence of the technology industries. The environmental destruction and increasing toxicity of our planet during the past half-century is symptomatic of a seeming inability to look beyond the next quarter’s profit-loss reports. It is this tendency toward short-sightedness that prompts The Long Now Foundation to carry the year out to five numerical places (e.g., 02006), a subtle reminder of our own decidedly transient role in the history of this planet. Do we dare take comfort in the notion (mixing equal parts Nietzsche and Andy Warhol) that our fifteen minutes of “world history” are nearly up? Since the previous issue of Vectors launched, the average age of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court dropped from 72 to 66. All indications suggest that the Roberts court, like the current administration’s “war on terror,” will be with us for a very long time. Many of the beliefs that once seemed most deeply etched in our national psyche — ideologies of freedom and privacy, for example — may be the very things that must be asserted most vigorously in the decades to come.
This issue of Vectors is not intended as a celebration of ephemerality, but rather a gesture of respect for the fleeting nature of the present and the material consequences of the past. Historical investigations, as Carlo Ginzburg argues, are sometimes most productive when they look for meaning in the least likely places. Each of the projects in this issue attempts to take seriously the significance of cultural artifacts that would otherwise be forgotten or overwhelmed by more official documents and discourses of history. The voices that reach us via things that were meant to be forgotten may in fact speak most eloquently to the imperatives and contradictions of our present historical moment. It is with equal degrees of irony and hopefulness that we present these works of excavation, rumination and preservation in a form that will soon confront its own likely disappearance.
Steve Anderson is an Assistant Professor of Interactive Media and Director of the Ph.D. program in Media Arts & Practice in the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He co-Edits the interdisciplinary online journal Vectors and is the creator of the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons. As a scholar-practitioner working at the intersection of media, culture and technology, his research interests include historiography, the theory and history of emerging technologies, documentary and experimental film and video, and interactive media design.