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.
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”
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.
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.
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 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.
Introduction to Cast-Offs from the Golden Age
The history of entertainment technologies, so the media and technology industries would have us believe, is best framed as a series of creative and technological triumphs, moving inexorably toward faster processing, increasingly realistic graphics and more engaging forms of interactivity. Like the film industry, game companies would probably prefer we didn’t think in terms of history at all, choosing instead to situate themselves on the brink of a perpetual future, looking forward to the next big thing rather than contemplating how we got here. Heroic attempts to recapture some of the rapidly fading history of the game industry – from JC Herz’s Joystick Nation to Van Burnham’s Supercade – have appeared from time to time, but usually with a focus on North American and Pacific Rim game industries and always seeking to map a comprehensive history of progress toward the present.
However, the stories that historians choose to tell about the past are often inextricably entangled with their own personality quirks and idiosyncratic obsessions. If we are honest about it, the narratives we pursue probably consist of as many dead-ends, digressions and anachronies as neatly packaged elements of a grand historical narrative. It is a rare work of history that not only acknowledges this, but seeks to weave it into the fabric of the historical work itself, becoming a strength rather than a liability. So it is with Melanie Swalwell’s Cast-Offs From the Golden Age, created in collaboration with Vectors Art Director Erik Loyer.
In order to experience the largely unexamined history of video games in New Zealand, Swalwell asks us to retrace some of her steps – and occasional missteps – in seeking to discover this arcane and fragmented history. Swalwell’s project refuses to deliver a comprehensive history, choosing instead to allegorize the research process by embedding bits of information within an information space. The implication is that, following Michel Foucault, all history is rightly conceived of in terms of fragmentation and partiality. The seductive narrative of the definitive, totalizing history is both mendacious and misleading. Swalwell’s investigation is part exploration and part role-playing-game, as different facts reveal themselves with each traversal of the research space. Although probably a source of frustration for “Dragnet historians” (those hoping to receive “just the facts”), the rewards of engaging fully with the dynamics of Swalwell and Loyers possibility space are as formidable as that of any totalizing historical narrative.
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.