Digital Baroque Part III and IV
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I won’t be presenting orally tomorrow, but please do check out the website I made on the text.
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REFLECTION
In Digital Baroque: New Media and Cinematic Folds, Timothy Murray explores linkages between old and new. Murray takes two seemingly disparate terms, “digital” and “baroque,” and puts them in theoretical proximity, discussing the digital baroque “as enfolding the user in the energetic present, as articulated in relation to the analog past while bearing on the digital future.” (7)
In an investigation of the relationship between the philosophies of art that informed the Baroque period and the realities of new media art, Murray searches for the “in-between” he associates with the Deleuzian concepts of the fold and incompossibility. Murray contends:
In the context of new media art, I propose that we consider the form or event of the irrational interval in relation to a series of incompossible events: archival intensities, interactivities, coded automatons, and the returns of the future. (249)
Furthermore, Murray calls for a conceptual shift from “linear visual projection to nonlinear temporal folds intrinsic to the digital form.” (28) New media art transcends past, present and future, yet remains discretely demarcated, “always, it seems, in the temporal space of the in-between.” (237)
Part III of Digital Baroque is a contemplation of the “memory of cinema in the digital age” (28). Murray explores the traumas in the “present past” and examines the potential of “revolutionary melancholia” exemplified in Chris Marker’s Level 5 (128). Building on his analysis of Level 5, Murray goes on to call for a “psychoanalytical approach” to new forms of media. He takes Toni Dove and Zoe Beloff’s works as a suggestion of the ways in which artists engage with play and philosophy. In doing so, he examines the possibility of transforming, adapting and reshaping the rules of conformity (191). Zoe Beloff’s digital work Philosophical Toy World exemplifies his concept of the “uncanny kaleidoscope” through interactivity and the visual retelling of the history of image (192). Beloff’s work is also a reminder of Deleuze’s belief, which Murray iterates earlier, that “through digital memory [..] the panoramic organization of space might lose the vertical privileging of direction. The screen could become a data bank through which information and the methods of its production replace nature.” (176) Moreover, as does Chris Marker’s Immemory CD-ROM, which Murray terms a “feverish delirium of the digital archive” and which certainly calls for a paradigmatic shift by viewers from receivers of projection to active interacts (226). Immemory is a composite of hundreds of photos and documents stored on CD-ROM. This very individual vehicle for Marker’s tour of memory draws on historical image and text. It is “something like an overlapping of times” that defines Immemory and which relentlessly challenges linear narrative and temporal singularity (230).
In considering artworks that position the user in a state of becoming, temporality is groundless and the possibility of interactivity in digital art is for Murray, crucial. In his exploration of this in-between of becoming, Murray suggests that “recent developments in digital art once again offer a promising deformation of the visual apparatus in a way that refigures and reenergizes narrative performance while providing materialized metaphors for a better understanding of the vicissitudes of artistic affect.” (222)
In the concluding part of Digital Baroque, Murray turns his attention to the possibilities of future cinema. The “bringing together of the before and the after in becoming” is the Deleuzian center, and the final words written, in his book (260). Jill Scott’s Frontiers of Utopia is a final example of Murray’s vision of the digital baroque. Scott’s work situates the viewer in “shifting intervals of passing presents” as they interact with women from different geographic and historic locations (251). Ultimately, Murray’s complicated theoretical work draws powerful connections between the digital and the Baroque. Moreover, his diverse selection of art works and philosophy support his position on the promises (past, present and future) of new media art. No matter which direction you look, the future looks bright.
CASE STUDY: CHRIS MARKER
Revolutionary Melancholia and
Past-Present Traumas
This section focuses on major themes present in Part III of Digital Baroque. Death, grief and trauma play significant roles in Murray’s explanation of the folds present in Chris Marker’s Level 5. Murray begins with the contention that locating death in the past becomes a psychological and social coping mechanism for dealing with trauma. He refers here to collective memory rather than personal memory, explaining that this mechanism is “not for the survivors themselves, who remained haunted by the specters of incorporation, but for the others, the children of the future, as if to protect them from the ooze of civilization’s deep wounds.” (160) Of Holocaust survivors whose pain was hidden away post-World War II, Murray writes, “they remained inside this collective body, as if mummified, with all their vivid details preserved and awaiting exposure.” (160) This “censorship” of public and private memory is taken up in Level 5 in Marker’s direct contemplation of the tragedy at Okinawa during WWII (161).
Level 5 follows Laura, a woman assigned to write a video game about the Battle of Okinawa. Throughout her research, Laura becomes entangle in the tragedy of Okinawa. While dealing with her own personal struggle of love lost, she contemplates memory, death and suffering. Marker’s mix of documentary footage and narrative fiction challenges the viewer to blur the line between history and story. Moreover, Marker’s work exposes the history of Okinawa and the mass suicides which remain marked by secrecy alongside Japanese and American complicity. Murray explains that,
Through these varying interviews and cinematic sequences, Marker’s film insistently sensitizes its viewer to how complexly the postwar approach to trauma was related to the codes and conventions of cinema and film’s approach to the horrific losses of history. (161)
Throughout Level 5, Marker acknowledges his own role as observer, as media maker, consistently redefining the relationship between producer and spectator. Marker’s work suggests the possibility of drawing from the contemplation of historical trauma in narrative cinema. By destabilizing the distinction between fiction and reality, our histories and our present, artists are able to generate “critical energy” making works that are moving and reflective. The political and the personal conjoin in the melancholic work Murray refers to, he explains,
Marker […] situates the unstable relation of memory and trauma against the backdrop of the history of international cinema and the ineluctability of sight, with a striking emphasis on the resounding variation of cinematic technique and tradition as demarcated by the conventional shifts of national difference and the clashes of cinematic style. (174)
Moreover, Murray turns to Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s question of whether “cinematic pleasure” requires us, “not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown?” (171) In turn, Murray conceptualizes the “wounds of repetition,” citing the French film Hiroshima mon amour as an example of this possibility. These wounds of repetition are dispersed throughout digital art and history. Again, Level 5 is exemplary as Murray recalls,
…this film’s stress on the lingering trace of the pathos of memory even after it is screened. Laura concludes the film by acknowledging that “I almost lost the echo of something I don’t know . . . which I cannot know but what my programmer foresaw.”
Further,
Such a concluding display of the shadowy haze of self-representation effectively screens the ellipses occupied and performed by the repetitions of digital enhancement and encoding that peel open for the viewer of Marker’s film the wounds of civilization. (177)
In between these wounds of repetition, between all those who have died and those who will, are the folds that define the Digital Baroque.
Second Life
In May of 2009 the Harvard Film Archive Hosted a virtual encounter with Chris Marker. The evening’s interaction took place entirely through the virtual world of Second Life. Marker gave a tour of his virtual world through his avatar, discussed his work with moderator avatars, and took questions for audience avatars. Having already built an island in the virtual space and documented it in his work Ouvroir, Marker takes his inhabitance there to the next level as he reaches back out of the world. Inhabiting the space, while interacting with the outside, Marker negotiates the boundaries between virtual and material space with a contemplative ease. One of Marker’s last works before his death in 2012, this Second Life interaction is emblematic of Murray’s claim that, “digital aesthetics can be said to position the spectator on the threshold of the virtual and actual.” (195)
Works Cited
Kaganski, Serge, and Julien Gester. “Chris Marker’s Second Life.” The Criterion Collection. N.p., 13 May 2009. Web. 06 Nov. 2016.
Murray, Timothy. Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 2008. Print.
“The Second Life of Chris Marker.” Harvard Film Archive. N.p., 2016. Web. 06 Nov. 2016.
QUESTIONS
1) What are the possibilities of the Digital Baroque in music? Do we have any examples to add to Murray’s survey? What is the potential of interactivity in auditory projects?
2) Is it possible for linear narratives to evoke the “fold” Murray refers to? Can traditional cinema, for example, challenge spectators understanding of time? Can it induce a feeling of movement across time in the same way as new media art?