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.

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.

Launch Memory issue of Vectors

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.

Launch Ephemera issue of Vectors

Introduction to Evidence issue of Vectors

For as long as we have been thinking about, designing, and programming this inaugural issue of Vectors, a war has been taking place half way around the world. Every day, that war is waged and information about it is disseminated using the very technologies that made conceiving this journal possible. How do we know what is really happening in that place? For those whose only exposure to the war is through streams of data mediated by screens like this one, it may be possible to suspect, as Jean Baudrillard famously declared some fifteen years ago, that none of it is really taking place at all.

For some time now, postmodern culture has comforted itself with the thought that our age is defined by unstable relations between signifier and signified; by delirious uncertainty not only about the past but our own access to events in the present. When words like evidence and reality begin to seem naked without quotation marks around them, it’s hard not to wonder if we aren’t simply playing into the hands of those who have the most to hide. With images of American soldiers torturing their captives fresh in our minds, those sanitized relays from smart missiles and satellites no longer hold the video game allure they once did. The creeping sense, articulated by Michael Moore, that “we are living in fictitious times” somehow no longer rings true. The times we are living in seem all too real and, against all expectations, the best evidence seems to lie in a few dozen grainy digital photographs e-mailed from the other side of the world.

In exploring the theme of Evidence, this issue of Vectors suggests that something of particular significance is at stake in our current relationship to the traces that are left behind by human actions. We invite you to explore the projects in this issue, each of which stages its own articulation of the meaning, nature and significance of evidence as a central element of scholarly practice. And we humbly dedicate this issue to those who have been killed by the ongoing violence in Iraq, whose numbers will never be known, whose remains may never be found, but whose traces should not be lost to history.

Launch Evidence issue of Vectors

Vectors Editorial Statement

It seems fitting that the editorial statement for a multimedia journal should itself be enacted in a dynamic form. Yet text continues in many ways to provide us with the means for our clearest form of expression. Thus, we commend this editorial statement to you as a hybrid introduction and metaphor for beginning to experience some of the ideas and pathways that weave their way throughout Vectors. This editorial “statement” attempts in part to represent the multiple collaborations and conflicts that take place in interactive and computational media, highlighting not only the virtual dialogue between creator and producer, but also the tenuous alliance of human and machine intelligence.

One of the primary and ongoing tensions in an academic multimedia journal is the question of how to deal with text. This is not a new question nor is it one that is peculiar to electronic publishing. One of the ways of dealing with text in a screen-based vernacular is to think of it as an instance of images. Usually this is marked by the shift from plain text to typography, which broadens the expressive palette to include fonts, layout, color, composition, contrast, opacity, dynamism, etc. Instead of treating text as images, we decided to explore — through our collaboration with Vectors Creative Director Raegan Kelly — what happens when we treat written text as an instance of code – more rather than less like the way the computer understands it.

The statement thus became a three-way conversation between us, Raegan, and the computer, seeking to create an environment where the words that we wrote were not necessarily privileged over Raegan’s programming or the output generated by the computer. The three output windows thus reflect the parallel “thought” processes of writer, designer, and processor. Finally, the system requires user collaboration in the form of keyword input and selection, patience, curiosity and a willingness to assemble meaning from diverse forms of human- and computer-generated lexia. We believe it is in this interplay of thinly veneered binary arrays that some of the most suggestive potentials of allographic composition may be found.

-Tara + Steve

Launch Vectors interactive editorial statement

Introduction to Jennifer Terry’s Killer Entertainments

Jennifer Terry’s Killer Entertainments presents challenges to both designers and users on many levels. How to critically address videos shot by soldiers engaged in combat without sensationalizing, decontextualizing or trivializing them? How to provide access to such a diverse and extensive range of work? How to insert commentary, context and background information while preserving the raw power of the original videos? In response to these challenges, author Jennifer Terry and designer Raegan Kelly developed a rhetoric of connection and accretion which resists linearity and the seductiveness of a single argument illustrated with evidence. Users are led toward no single interpretation; no replacement ideology takes over from that of the Administration’s party line. Indeed the text allows for and even encourages responses based in idiosyncracy and uncertainty. The source material presented here all comes from “the Internet,” but what does that mean? What can it mean? Which of the sites hosting these materials are “real” and which are run by counter-intelligence agencies hoping to track usage patterns among potential dissidents via IP addresses?

Terry’s text also refuses the screen-media convention of text that has been reduced to digestible lexia. The micronarratives, profiles and backstories that make up Terry’s analysis, like the unedited videos themselves, insist on a certain investment of time, thought and connection-making. Curiosity and patience are rewarded with a rare feeling that one is not simply the conduit for one of several predetermined responses being called up by mainstream media or academic commentary. In an age when the Google search engine can claim to return over 6 million references to “iraq war” in “(0.11 seconds),” the issue no longer seems to be gaining access to information so much as knowing what to do when we have it at our fingertips. Part of the power of Terry’s commentary lies in the flat understatement of her text. When she drops raw figures — such as the fact that coalition forces have fired more than 250,000 bullets for every “insurgent” killed in Iraq — the number seems to hang impossibly on the page. The point is not to dramatize, shock or dismay, but to suggest the importance of educating ourselves out of our narrowness of concern. The Iraq war is happening now — with men and women killing and dying in our names whether we like it or not. We owe it to them, at the very least, to watch, read, listen, think, and then decide for ourselves exactly how we intend to act.

Introduction to Nation on the Move

In Minoo Moallem’s Nation on the Move, Persian carpets function as both literal objects of textual analysis and also as metaphors for how objects of transnational exchange are produced, marketed and consumed. Along the way, they accrue a multiplicity of meanings and provide glimpses into complex circuits of labor, ideology and imagination. Erik Loyer’s interface for the project is deceptively simple, mobilizing a playful metaphor for the weaving process itself, as users are invited to make connections between nodes of information, artifacts and analysis by stretching a string across the surface of an image. Moallem’s analysis is dense with allusion and a multiplicity of voices that create a rich (dare I say?) tapestry of perspectives, analytical paradigms and potential axes of investigation. Among the most powerful elements of this far-reaching exploration are the author’s own ethnographic research materials, which remind us of the labor and lived experience of the women who actually make the carpets. Their stories and experiences are rendered through images, conversations and testimonies that ground the analysis of broader circuits of distribution and consumption.

Nation on the Move is also one of the first Vectors projects to deploy an alternative indexing system which makes the project’s full contents available via an interface, generated dynamically from the database of materials feeding the project. The visualization engine used for this parallel interface reveals the categories and connections used to map the materials feeding Loyer’s interface, but significantly, each item in the database is assigned a discrete URL to facilitate citation, indexing and accessibility. Although the primary Vectors interface remains the richest and most stimulating means of experiencing Moallem’s work, we hope that making each element of her research and analysis available externally will help the project find a broader audience and suggest possibilities for extending her investigation even further.

Introduction to The Virtual Window Interactive

“As we spend more of our time staring into the frames of movies, television, computers, hand-held displays — “windows” full of moving images, text, icons, and 3D graphics — how the world is framed may be as important as what is contained within that frame.”

This opening declaration in Anne Friedberg’s new book The Virtual Window: From Alberti to Microsoft, offers a glimpse of what is at stake in her expansive survey of visual culture over the past 500 years. The Virtual Window, published by MIT Press just weeks before the launch of the Vectors “Perception” issue, offers the opportunity to think deeply about the entangled forces that contribute to the evolution of technologies of vision — everything from the etymology of key terms in visual culture to the science of glass manufacturing. Along the way, Friedberg seeks to theorize and historicize vision itself through a variety of critical “lenses,” each of which operates in conjunction with certain technologies at specific moments in time. At first glance, Friedberg’s elegantly crafted written work might not seem like an obvious source for digital reinterpretation. Indeed, it is a rare historian who is willing to subject such exacting scholarship to an interactive format that allows (and even encourages) playfulness, anachronism and surprise.

But the Virtual Window Interactive should not be regarded as a mere translation of the book. Through her collaboration with Erik Loyer, Friedberg uses the interactive format to construct a literal enactment of her critical paradigm of the “split optic,” a form of parallel vision that considers both past and present simultaneously. Through juxtaposition of apertures, contents and avatar-viewers, The Virtual Window Interactive invites us to think critically about the past in light of present sensibilities, while using the past as a vehicle for thinking critically about the present. A genuinely eclectic range of primary source material places Stephen Colbert’s “Green Screen Challenge” on a continuum that includes both Hitchcock and Rembrandt; and there is nothing to prevent a user from viewing a cinemascope film within the aperture of a video iPod, or watching excerpts from I Love Lucy in the frame of a Renaissance era stained glass window.

It is in the nature of interactive projects that you can never really be sure that you have read every word and seen every image. This is especially true of The Virtual Window Interactive, which requires patience and experimentation in order to experience it fully. Certain elements of Friedberg’s text only become available in conjunction with particular combinations of aperture and content, for example, so an assiduous user might discover new elements upon repeated excursions into the project. In addition, many of the media examples in the interactive version are not addressed in the published text, and the project’s database structure allows for the possibility of future addition, updating and revision. This mutability and expansiveness is arguably one of the most powerful aspects of digital publishing, and Vectors is fortunate that Friedberg was willing to risk having her scholarship subjected to potentially playful as well as serious interrogation. What Friedberg and Loyer achieve with The Virtual Window Interactive is a mode of scholarly practice that is experiential, remixable and fluid, perhaps ultimately in ways that exceed the intentions of its creators.

Introduction to Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies

In its year-end roundup for 2006, the New York Times declared “sousveillance” to be one of the key “ideas” of the year. Never mind that the list also includes “yodeling” “tushology” and “digital maoism,” when the NYT shows up with a six-pack under its arm, the party is probably nearly over anyway. Trevor Paglen didn’t invent the idea of reversing the gaze of the cultural panopticon, but he has been doing it with extraordinary virtuosity for nearly ten years. Legend has it that Paglen, who has been called the Fox Mulder of cultural geography, was personally instrumental in provoking the military to extend the perimeter around Area 51 by several miles in an attempt to thwart one of his counter-surveillance efforts, which he dubs “limit telephotography.” Basically, Paglen leads tours around the edges of the military industrial complex, and true to his training as a geographer, maps the contours and the surfaces that conceal as much as they give away. Even black-world operations, the government’s double-secret programs that take place largely in remote deserts and mountains, involve people and objects such as planes. And just as people and objects obey certain basic laws of physics (such as having mass and taking up space), they can be tracked using tools that are variously high and low tech – from high-power telephoto lenses to FAA flight-tracking data. Unmarked Planes and Hidden Geographies has it all. Fuzzy counter-surveillance photos taken from miles away sit side-by-side with crisply rendered map tracking data that shows the routes taken by planes with blocked tail numbers and no official destinations.

Paglen’s work deftly limns the boundaries between art and scholarship while also suggesting a provocative conjunction of politics and tourism. His unassuming prose requires visitors to read between the lines in order to generate their own interpretations and conclusions. Even if the truth is out there, Paglen’s work argues implicitly, finding answers is not an easy task. As access to unalloyed truth seems increasingly to occupy an elusive position on an infinitely receding horizon, Paglen’s rare type of work becomes ever more important. A responsible citizenry may no longer rely (if indeed it ever could) on official pronouncements from corporate and governmental press offices. Instead, those who wish to educate themselves about the world must function as detectives or journalists, following threads and triangulating sources. Paglen’s work is exemplary for its insistent look at some of the things we may least want to admit about our government. And his method is ultimately pedagogical, proferring more questions than answers, along with hints about how to uncover the truth for ourselves, if only we have the nerve to do so.

Introduction to Panorama Ephemera

No treatment of the theme Ephemera would be complete without considering Rick Prelinger’s work over the past two decades to preserve, archive and recognize the value of Hollywood’s “other,” the obscure and sometimes surreal world of ephemeral films. The San Francisco-based Prelinger, who has been collecting advertising, educational and industrial films for more than two decades, in 2002 sold his collection of over 50,000 films to the Library of Congress. He has since turned his energies to advocating a renewed conception of archival practice that involves actively pushing works out into the public, rather than simply storing them passively.

In 2005, Prelinger completed a feature film titled Panorama Ephemera, a meditative chronicle remarkably free of the camp humor of many ephemeral remixes. The images and sounds presented in Prelinger’s film are treated with meticulous respect for their materiality and status as signifying objects. Each shot or sequence in the film forms part of a “cognitive map” of American history, revealing patterns of obsession that orbit around such mundane but foundational themes as growing food, Westward migration, the transformation of landscape, and the development of democracy, as well as relationships among animals, humans, nature and civilization.

The online version of Panorama Ephemera, created in collaboration with Vectors Art Director Raegan Kelly, is similarly devoted to preserving the integrity of individual media elements, while interweaving them with Prelinger’s own personal and professional trajectories, milestones and musings. Perhaps most interesting is the opportunity this project provides to explore Prelinger’s personal history via the artifacts by which his career has been defined. In foregrounding Prelinger’s personal history as a lens through which to view the films, Panorama Ephemera models a form of historiography, that underscores the inevitability of authorial intervention in the process of assembling a historical narrative.