Technologies of History
My book Technologies of History: Visual Media, and the Eccentricity of the Past has just been published by Dartmouth Press and is due for release in March 2011. 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.
Open Source: Cinema in the Public Domain
An article examining the historical, political and technological implications of the open source movement for cinematic production.
Abstract:
February 24, 2004. Also known as Grey Tuesday. Over 100,000 copies of DJ Danger Mouse’s Grey Album are downloaded from hundreds of sites across the Internet. An estimated million copies of this celebrated remix of the Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album are traded over peer-to-peer networks within 24 hours. A symbolic gesture perhaps, but the electronic civil disobedience of Grey Tuesday eloquently speaks to both consumer frustrations with increasingly restrictive copyright laws and the growing power of peer networks to subvert the enforcement of those laws. Clearly the battle lines have been drawn for the culture wars of the 21st century. At stake is the continued existence of a meaningful sphere of free culture called the public domain. The battle promises to be epic, bringing cherished American ideals of originality, creativity and the ability to profit from one’s labor into seeming conflict with equally powerful desires for freedom of speech and expression. And what happens when the movie industry finally has its own Grey Tuesday? In spite of its demonstrated ineffectiveness, the MPAA appears determined to follow the music industry’s shock-and-awe strategy of indiscriminate prosecutions. All of which means more lawsuits, more bitterness, and ultimately, more effective tactics of resistance.
Published in Res Magazine Jan/Feb 2005
Review of The Five Obstructions
Review of The Five Obstructions, directed by Lars Von Trier and Jorgen Leth
Abstract:
Ever since the widespread publication of photographs showing American soldiers torturing Iraqi captives in the Abu Ghraib prison, Michael Moore’s Oscars night exhortation 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 proof seems to lie in a few dozen grainy digital photographs e-mailed from half way around the world. For a long time now, postmodern culture has comforted itself with the thought that our age is defined by the simulacrum, an exact copy for which there is no original. But even in the midst of a media culture obsessed with remakes and franchising of familiar products, the works that transcend are those which bother to explore in a non-trivial way the relations between people; reality and artifice; old and new, the mixed-up muddle of construction, conceit, authenticity and belief that is contemporary media.
Published in Really Good Films 2003
Review of 28 Days Later
Review of 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle
Abstract:
Cinematic fantasies of the ultimate human Apocalypse, it seems, no longer require nuclear holocaust, alien invasion or hurtling asteroids. In Danny Boyle’s terrifying thriller 28 Days Later, the end of the world as we know it is just one ill-conceived lab experiment and four weeks of rapid infection away. Wrongly pegged as an updated contribution to the zombie-horror genre of the 1970s, 28 Days Later in fact owes more to Hitchcock than to George Romero. Boyle, who directed cult favorites Shallow Grave (1994) and trainspotting (1996) seemed to have succumbed to the world of big-budget Hollywood with his critically reviled The Beach in 2000. With 28 Days Later, however, Boyle reasserts himself as one of the UK’s most compelling directors and a master of edgy suspense.
Published in Really Good Films 2003
Review of The Legend of Suriyothai
Review of The Legend of Suriyothai, directed by Chatri Chalerm Yukol
Abstract:
What would an epic film trumpeting early American history, financed by George W. Bush, starring a favorite White House aid, and featuring the American military in all its glory look like? Oh, and the film would be directed by one of the Bush daughters… It’s a scary thought to be sure, but such a film would parallel the story behind the grand Thai epic, The Legend of Suriyothai, an extravagant history film that has become that country’s box office king, beating out the likes of Godzilla and Jurassic Park II upon its release in 2001, and which is now making its way to American movie screens.
Published in Really Good Films 2003
Dissolving Boundaries: Pat O’Neill Experiments in Hollywood
A profile of industry iconoclast and experimental film legend Pat O’Neill
Abstract:
A new film by Pat O’Neill is to the experimental film world what a planetary alignment is to astrophysicists, a rare and momentous event, promising a glimpse into the workings of laws of light and movement – perhaps even a new way of seeing the world. For O’Neill to complete two projects at once – a 35mm film The Decay of Fiction and a DVD ROM Tracing the Decay of Fiction – is more like a supernova colliding with a black hole: the convergence of two extraordinary phenomena in a single moment – a nearly inconceivable occurrence from a man who thinks nothing of waiting an entire year to photograph a ray of sunlight shining through a window at a particular angle.
Published in Release Print September 2002
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Seeing Is Believing: Unseen Cinema
Seeing Is Believing: Unseen Cinema unearths a new history of the early American avant-garde.
Abstract:
The most interesting histories are those that dispute prevailing narratives or reclaim a past that is in danger of being lost. Indeed, the essence of historiography is discursive and cultural struggle – the preservation, revision and contestation of a consequential past – not the accumulation of polite facts in academic volumes. Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941, a joint project of Anthology Film Archives and the Deutsches Filmmuseum in Frankfurt, offers one such undertaking. Curated by Bruce Posner, the travelling program of films – a staggering 22 hours’ worth – is a rare attempt at both historical revision and preservation, and if things go well, one that is likely to provoke both controversy and interest in this long-neglected corner of film history.
Published in The Independent July 2001
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The Experimental Scene: L.A.’s Media Renegades
Profiles of alternative media makers in Los Angeles including William Jones, Erika Suderberg, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Jesse Lerner and Ming-Yuen S. Ma
Abstract:
An often-overlooked fact about Los Angeles is that the city is home to some of the most diverse and cutting edge experimental media production in the world. The scene has a long history stretching back to the 1920s, but it also has a very current presence, thanks to the work of numerous artists whose work brings together a commitment to theoretical sophistication, stylistic innovation, and political engagement. Many of these artists express their faith in the power of alternative media by performing in multiple capacities, making films, videos or multimedia projects while also teaching, writing, and curating. Among these artists are William Jones, Erika Suderberg, Tran T. Kim-Trang, Jesse Lerner and Ming-Yuen S. Ma. For these makers, “independence” is a necessity rather than a marketing strategy – they do not aspire to three-picture deals with the latest mega-merged entertainment industry giant or even a distribution deal with Miramax. Although their work is widely disparate both formally and thematically, these artists together constitute a strong, smart, and much needed alternative media presence in a city that, thanks to diminished arts funding, has almost no remaining infrastructure to support them.
Published in The Independent, March 2000
Review: Making Images Move
A review of Jan-Christopher Horak’s book Making Images Move
Abstract:
In histories of cinema, photography is often figured as a mere technological stepping stone, a necessary but primitive moment in the inexorable progression toward increasingly realistic forms of representation. According to this narrative, the prodigious time-motion experiments of Muybridge and Marey seem quaintly tragic in their failure to achieve an illusion of movement which is today taken for granted. But, as some of the earliest commentators on cinema noted, it was photography, not film, which provided rare glimpses into worlds that are invisible to the naked eye. Movies, as Warhol reminded us, do little more than slavishly recreate the world as we see it, replete with all its artifice and tedium. While some photographers have claimed to realize greater flexibility in the transition from still to moving images, others have sustained a complex and productive engagement with the two. Unfortunately, the creative interrelationship of film and photography has been largely neglected by critics of both media. With a detailed examination of eight photographer/filmmakers, Jan-Christopher Horak’s new book, Making Images Move, offers an intelligent and much-needed contribution to this gap in contemporary scholarship.
Published in Film Quarterly Summer 1999
Review: The Exploding Eye
A review of Wheeler Winston Dixon’s The Exploding Eye: A Re-visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema
Abstract:
Wheeler Winston Dixon’s goal in The Exploding Eye: A Revisionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema is a noble one. In a brief introduction, Dixon outlines his desire for a “work of recovery and regeneration” that will call attention to “those filmmakers whose works have escaped into the phantom zone of the absent signifier.” Himself an experimental filmmaker, critic, and first-hand participant in the New York alternative film scene of the 1960s, Dixon seems like a logical person to undertake such a revision, to challenge existing canons and construct a new history that hews close to the intentions, words, and films of the innumerable unsung artists of this extraordinarily fertile period in experimental cinema. Unfortunately, while Dixon’s book may serve as a useful handbook on selected filmmakers who have slipped through the cracks of history, it fails to address any of the most compelling questions about how and why such cracks and canons are formed and ultimately does not live up to either its historical promise or revisionist aspirations. Published in Film Quarterly Summer 1999
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 is the author of Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past (Dartmouth 2011), co-Editor of the interdisciplinary online journal Vectors and creator of the fair use advocacy site Critical Commons. 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.