The Work of Art in the Age of ??????? (Biocybernetic Reproduction, Environmental Destruction, etc…)
In the 2002 novella, Bleeding Through, Norman Klein introduced database narratives as a mode of storytelling in layers, which responds to the reader/viewer in the digital age who is accustomed to multi-tasking and engaging in simultaneous media consumption.
Flash-forward (or rather, scroll-down) five years, Norman Klein continues to be concerned with the impact of new forms of media consumption on culture, memory and the reader, and has furthered his critical stance on the place of database narratives. In “Spaces Between Traveling through Bleeds, Apertures, and Wormholes inside the Database Novel” – a dark, oblique manifesto for future database novelists – he shares what he has learned since 2002, beginning with outlining new developments in the media landscape. Firstly, two “corrosive” decades of digital media consumption have reconfigured the role of reader/viewer as a tourist – in the pejorative sense of ‘just visiting’ and never fully engaging with one’s surroundings and culture. Computer-based digital media is “strangl[ing] us with user-friendly data” and leaving stories “thin as bumper stickers” (30). He links this media environment to the development of viewers being positioned as the character in new media texts.
Secondly, he observes that our civilization – now a “comic tragedy” – is in the early stages of decline. However, in the realm of culture, it is “too soon to tell” and this uncertain era could potentially be the start of a golden age. He believes that most new media narratives are so preoccupied with appearing aesthetically and technically polished that the world’s contradictions and paradoxes are erased. Database narratives, he submits, offer the possibility for groundbreaking modes of storytelling that expose and explore these paradoxes. As opposed to focusing on the “flash” of the technology, he is calling for a re-focus on content and specifically, the intimate details of the everyday, which make stories more “raw” and uneasy for the viewer.
With the purpose of advancing the genre toward a more critical and meaningful existence, he then sketches seven tools for future creators of database novels to contemplate and build upon. They are outlined below.
Renaissance-era books that focus on the organization of data (not unlike a computer) should be considered as a “point of origin,” while other forms and storytelling devices will have to be discarded (e.g. 3-Act structures, film grammar, etc.).
Absences (the gaps in the narrative that stimulate the reader’s imagination) are a key aspect to stories – whether cinematic, literary or digital. To allow room for the viewer to create their own narrative bridges in database fiction, the viewer is repositioned as engineer or maker, but not as author, nor as character (conventional narrative modes that encourage identification and position the viewer as character). This allows for a movement away from the cultural tourism mentioned above in that the viewer is not a tourist waiting to be guided around, but is a navigator who is left to create their own narrative bridges between the gaps in the story. Klein explains, “the width and paradox of the gap are its apertures” and apertures in database novels are what allows the viewer to adjust their engagement and reading of the database novel (20).
Bleeding (dissolving through images), wormholes (shortcuts through or inside interfaces), and animating assets through gliding or sliding images are tools that further the meaning of, and structure the viewers journey through, a database novel.
The final tool discussed by Klein is the Picaresque, the Baroque mode of storytelling defined by episodic breaks, flat eccentric characters and a wandering through a labyrinth-like world, which has informed Latin American magical realism and science fiction (27). He sees this mode as the ideal form for the database novel, no only because it drives an the viewer’s exploration of archival and seemingly disparate elements, but because it allows for “a pilgrimage” through our civilization’s decline (29).
Klein describes his latest database film, The Imaginary Twentieth Century, as employing these tools to varying degrees. The work is described as being about “seduction – sexual, futuristic, apocalyptic, utopian” where promises never quite add up like “plastic surgery failing to look like the original” (26). His comment here could very well be extended to discourses surrounding new technologies and future cinema. Early in this essay, which has a realist, less-utopic tone than others we’ve read thus far, Klein writes “we cannot return to the media enthusiasms of the 1990’s, no more obsession with design, new software, and CG polish,” implying perhaps that theorist and authors of future cinema works should be careful not to solely congratulate technical achievements, without some attention to the content’s larger impact and engagement with socio-cultural complexities and contradictions (5).
Questions
1. A reoccurring theme for Future Cinema is the changing role of the author and the reader/viewer with the advent of new technologies. In both Klein’s 2002 and 2007 essays, he displays a subtle anxiety toward mediated extensions of the body, and the resulting splitting of attention spans, which he believes has made forgetting too easy and responding unlikely. In this context, who is to blame, or who is responsible, for modes of reading and viewing that preserve cultural memory and the archive? The viewer/reader or the author?
2. Leading theorists of database cinema, such as Lev Manovic and Marsha Kinder, engage in a debate that questions whether database and narrative are competitive or compatible forces. Klein, like Kinder, believes that the database interface is complimentary because it allows for new and engaging narrative possibilities. However, aporia creates a sense of ‘seeing the trees and not the forest’ and to what extent is ‘seeing the forest’ crucial when the narrative addresses history and/or a civilization in decline? The environmental and economic crisis today may be partly attributed to our difficulty in recognizing and comprehending the scale and interconnectivity of our actions. Narrative has the power to explore these complex interrelationships, but would a database narrative that address these issues leave too much unexplained?
3. Do you agree with Klein’s claim “that no mode of hypertext can equal the evocative power of what the reader mentally fills in” (14)? While the creators of CSI beg to differ, the NY Post journalist supports Klein. See: http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/csi_creator_hopes_digital_novel_6iKl5V1jmsPHa8dLieQbKM