Digital visual culture
The history of spectacle
• The fairground• The circus• The magic show
Magic and Spectacle
• George Meleis
Cinema, spectacle and narrative
• Cinema began as an extension of magic and Spectacle
• Narrative was secondary
Cinema develops
• An increasing inportance of narrative, plot and characterisation as cinema develops
Modernism
• Process• Universal language• Revolution
Vertov
• the rejection of narrative in favour of a universal language of documentary and montage
Montage
• Montage as a precursor of computer graphics
Semiotics• Theory of the creation of meaning in
signs• Signifier - the representation of the
object• Signified - the concept of idea in
our heads of the object being referred to
• Referent - the originating real world object that is being referred to
Baudrillard• A society dominated by simulation• Where the simulated is more 'real'
than the real• What happens to the idea of the
referent if our entire experience stems from simulation rather than reality
• Where is the referent?
Contradictions of quality
• Digital media less high quality that analogue?
• Digital media no loss of quality in reproduction
• Not necessarily
The modernist pixel
• The pixel as a signifier of modernist principles
• Modularity• Systematisation• Fidelity and quality traded for
reproducability and distributability
The postmodern pixel
• The pixel as a signifer of the fundamental emptyness at the heart of simulation
Surface play
• Darley suggests that in digital visual culture, the idea of 'surface play' is dominent.
– Reproducibility– repetition– self-referentiality – intertextuality– simulation– pastiche– superficiality and spectacle
The re-emergence of spectacle
• The re-emergence of spectacle as a theme in digital visual culture
• e.g. the increasing precedence of special effects techniques in action films over narrative and plot
Remediation
• The systematic reinterpretation and reuse of older media forms in the creation of new forms
Military development of computer graphics
• Radar as precursor of knowledge based work
• A move of physical to sensory work• Origin of human factors theory in
working out how to make humans more efficient
• Computers creating images• Computers reading images
So what direction for new media?
• The database as a media form• The viewer as creator of narrative
by selecting from a database• Artificial intelligence as a partner
in the image making process• Images made for the consumption
of computers
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