Future Cinema

Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds – Chapters 1-5

Key Terms
Baroque: Historical term used to describe the art of the 17^th century that is characterized by ornate detail. This artistic style used exaggerated motion and  detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur.

The Fold: “a flexible or an elastic body still has cohering parts that form a fold, such that they are not separated into parts of parts but are rather divided to infinity in smaller and smaller folds that always retain a certain cohesion. Thus a continuous labyrinth is not a line dissolving into grains, but resembles a sheet of paper divided into infinite folds or separated into bending movements, each one determined by the consistent or conspiring surroundings.” (Deleuz)

Digital Baroque Summary

“Digital” and “Baroque” are two words we would not normally consider together. However, Timothy Murray’s Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds uses the concept of “the fold” (developed in Deleuze’s The Fold: Liebniz and the Baroque) to examine the interconnectedness of the two.

Murray begins Digital Baroque by posing two questions:

1. Does new media stand forth as a reminder of the mortality of cinema?
2. Does the Baroque function as a marker of the death of cinema in the twenty-first century as an energetic carrier of the figures of mourning, melancholia so fundamental to the Baroque?”

By providing close readings and analyses of films, videos, CD-ROMs, and installations attuned to the baroque nuances of the fold, Murray aims to shift critical attention away from the romantic and modernist strategies that have dominated the criticism and creation of new media.

Murray argues that new media art practices are informed by pre-modern thought processes and artistic practices, specifically, the Baroque. As Murray states, “new media screen arts consistently embody and display the tissue of baroque paradigms, from the dynamics of serial accumulation and the trauma of temporal folds to the cultural promise of what I will call digital incompossibility that makes quake the previously confident stature of single-centered subjectivity” (17).

Murray suggests that digital art (e.g., CD-ROMs, installations, interactive websites) is a representation of the Baroque for several reasons:

1. Murray uses a variety of new media artists such as June Paik, Bill Viola, Thierry Kuntzel, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Chris Marker, and more to highlight the relations between digital art and Baroque.
2. Unlike art of the Baroque period, we are capable of interacting with a piece of digital art. This interaction is significant in terms of the fold. The “communication between” digital artwork and its user is not simply a hyperlink to another website or page within a page. What now occurs between two texts is not a matter of opposition, but rather that adds too and extends the original piece. I.e. more folds.

By applying the concept of the fold to digital art, Murray suggests, “the fold is the machinery of intersubjectivity and inter-activity” (6).  Murray’s use of the Baroque, thus, suggests that the fold represents how participants are included in and become a part of art.

Murray divides Digital Baroque into 4 sections. Each section of the book focuses on a specific temporal mode (past, present, and future), but does not move in a chronological progression from front to back, but is folded and enfolded. Each section or chapter could point to, refer to, or provide a hyperlink to other chapters in the book.

Part I: From Video Black to Digital Baroque

Chapter 1 outlines performative passages through early modern space and epistemology by contemporary video installation artists. This chapter articulates how the new media subject becomes inscribed in the accumulating flow of digital data, information, and imagery. Chapter 2 applies this analysis of electronic intensity to the understanding of representational power put forth by the philosopher of early modern representation, Louis Marin, and the cinema and video artist, Thierry Kuntzel. Kuntzel’s work provides this chapter with a conceptual landscape for the consideration of paradigms of light, power, and corporeality. This is significant for contemporary politics of race and sexuality.

Part II: Digital Deleuze: Baroque Folds of Shakespearean Passage

This section brings Deleuze and William Shakespeare together to provide the textual and intellectual frameworks for cinematic statements on the Baroque by JeanLuc Godard and Peter Greenaway. Chapter 3 is shaped by Godard’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear for a dialogue between Godard and Deleuze. Murray looks at the restoring of a new baroque era where Godardian cinema seems caught within clashing systems of analog and digital representation. Chapter 4 shifts its attention to the panoramic mise-en-scène of “collective memory.” This positions Greenaway’s sensitivity to serialization, time, and trauma in dialogue with Deleuze’s articulation of the philosophical promise of new cinema. The cinematic fold is distinguished as the textured event shared by writing, the deep memory of the archive, and the digital technologies that produce, retain, and disseminate text and images.

Part III: Present Past: Digitality, Psychoanalysis, and the Memory of Cinema

This section concentrates on the memory of cinema in the digital age. Chapter 5 sketches the relation of melancholic baroque concerns with the death of cinema in the age of new media to narratives of loss and trauma as staged in a range of experimental projects in digital media, including tapes by Gary Hill and Daniel Reeves and CD-ROMs by Grace Quintanilla and Keith Piper.

In sum, Murray makes an unexpected connection between the old and the new, and analyzes the philosophical paradigms that inform contemporary screen arts. This connection between contemporary art and the past, as well as contemporary art and the Baroque, will be further discussed on Wedneday. In the interest of this summary, I did not detail the examples and case studies Murray uses to support his thesis. I will discuss these further in my presentation, as well as applying contemporary virtual reality technologies and experiences to see if these works can also apply to Murray’s work. I look forward to an enlivening discussion. See you Wednesday!

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