Marchessault and Lord - Fluid Screens, Expanded Cinema

INTRODUCTION
• McLuhan distrustful of idea of flows "as a way of thinking about the spatial and temporal formations of electric media" ; prefers field (Appadurai's scapes?) ** link to Terranova's flows
• objects generate their own space
• new fluidity is time
• convergence - transmission through a single medium (5)
• Jenkins - understanding convergence as a process with many diff manifestations
• convergence of media - cultural industries
• concentration of power and effect on national cultures worldwide, "which is why cultural policy is absolutely vital to our thinking about expanded cinema" (5)
• Jenkins - social and organic aspects of convergence - as in "the social and cultural practices of consumption that can be seen as active and open-ended" (6)
• bricoleur of media landscapes
• "connected to DIY cultures, the cultures of personal archiving, digital storytelling, creative interactions, and new forms of political solidarity that are enabled by digital media" (6) **link to Stalder's punk/diy
• Benjamin - studied tension between greater cultural diversity and homogenization
• framework - media archeology, cinema as a concretion of the flow of everyday life
• expanded cinema - frame outwards, immersive, interactive, interconnected
• Youngblood - understands these within 3 avenues: 1) synesthesia, 2)intermediality, 3)global public (7)
• utopian
• link b/w mind and media
• transformation of the public sphere - expansion and contraction
• Benjamin - phantasmagoria (and its recognition of the sensorium)
• Kraucer - mass ornament (as immersive environment of modernity's techs and spectacles) (9)
• both --> convergence as facism
• Friedberg - mobile gaze of spectatorship
• Benjamin - potential for politicization of art
• double vision of what is lost and what s found
• this "new scopic regime signals a return of the aura and a further derealization of sentience rather than its redemption"
• sentience means able to sense or feel things
• collective experience within the capitalist phantasmagoria
• Benjamin - demands of art "to restore the instinctual power of the human bodily senses for the sake of humanity's self-preservation, by passing through new technologies... (11) whatever that means
• McLuhan - artists are 'ANTENNAE' of culture - they take on human perception and cognition as their object

PART 1 : Immersion
3 - The Networked Screen
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PART 2: Archive
7 - Feminist Digital Aesthetics
• politics of time, underscoring modernity and tech
• power to fill empty time
• Bhabba's warnign against "presentism" - net may brain drain everyday life of its historical memory
• lost feminism lost art
• finding this "lost" feminist art online (145)
• "an uncanny number of women working online were describing digital writing technologies through the invocation of second-wave feminist terms like 'the everyday'' 'women's time' and embodiment, and contrasting these with the demands of geometric space and linear time, often posited as masculine" (Fisher in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 145)
• about nostalgia? ** link to Juhazs
• culture as tied to a sense of place (Q - what about queer culture??) home as a site of recognition, negotiation, cultural reproduction
• 2nd wave before sex and gender were uncoupled
• Linda Hutcheon - nostalgia - to return home (root) and pain, homesickness
• recycling the past
• hypertext as feminist friendly- wherein "ideas of centre, margin, hierarchy, and linearity' are replaced by 'multilinearity, nodes, links and networks" (Fisher in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 149)
• follows the logic of collectives, privileging the unheard, unspoken, unimportant, diff experiences
• writing as personal and public discourse merged in hypertext - writing as a process, "what else is html?" *** non permanence of sites rooted in feminist politic
• ARCHIVES:
• constructing new narratives and stories or resistance ** link to Arondekar's narratives of recovery
• "These digital projects often collect individual women's 'authentic' personal stories creating archived encyclopedic sites that aim to tell collective truths" (Fisher in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 150)
• "What is striking, given current feminist projects aimed at deconstructing identities and challenging even the building of narratives or bodies to inhabit, is the lack of critical framework offered by the women constructing these archives" (Fisher in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 151)
• longstanding feminist project of telling 'lost stories' of women
• root of hypertext in weaving **link to jake moore
• ref to women's trad needlecrafts
• retelling known stories from a different point of view (as a "classic feminist strategy")(Fisher in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 154)
• collecting as "evidence of continuity and symbolic communication with the past" (Fisher in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 155)
• allowing nostalgia to "channel new possibilities into old pathways"
• generating new texts from what may appear naive, essentialist, old

10 - From Sequence to Stream
• emergence of db narratives, copyleft, archive plundering (??), file sharing, etc
• artists working with diff tools, vobabs and ontologies (the branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being.)
• "the ontological status of the archive, its truth-yielding potential, has become unusable for the production of counter-truths" (Lord in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 193)
• liquid modernity - infinite multiplication of truth claims and their correlative commodification - which means now artists dealing with historical issues (like Raad) "is now forced to relinquish the future of truth that the interrogated, critically montaged archive had promised" (Lord in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 193)
• artists making and unmaking history of the present (??)
• HISTORY AND MEMORY
• feminist media arts - Sara Diamond - Women's Labour History Project - is based projects differ from Raad bc they believe in an alternative history
• imagining an untold story or counter-hist
• working through trauma, memory, fantasy and forgetting
• imaging as referential
• ethical imperative
• memory works by 8- and 90s artists
• "activist archive" (Lord in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 194)
• "That work on the archive was a critical engagement with history as a project of human creation and, as such, an extension of a modern, Western project of historicity and political imagination where the future was thinkable, albeit unknowable and unstable, and where one sequence of temporal events, although internally unified, can be radically discontinuous from another." (Lord in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 194–95)
• memory without border, increasing.. bulwark against obsolescence, attack of the present and loss of national or communal memory
• expansive media archive (creation of an aesthetic and politics of time), particularity of human suffering
• THE IMAGE OF HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF TIME
• the status of image as referent and evidence
• instantaneity and simultaneity of space-time compression ** link to Terranova
• built on global flows
• "The digital artwork must be networked, and the formation of alternative networks is a critical function of them" (Cubitt in Lord, in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 199)
• STREAM, SIMULTANEITIES, AND RECOMBINANT HISTORIES
• key concepts: (borrowed from Skoller)
• "sideshadowin" (M A Bernstein) a means to create historical narratives in which multiple possibilities for historical outcomes coexist, complex rather than cause and effect, , "it creates an awareness of the indeterminacy of relatins between events. There is no inevitable outcome to anything, because so many things are happening simultaneously" (Bernstein in Lord, in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 199–200)
• "virtuality" (from Deleuze), defined as the dynamic between the actual and the virtual, potential for change, "powers of the false: 'undecidability between what is true, what was actual, and what is potential" **such as the wrk of Walid Raad and the Atlas Group (Lord in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 199)
• poco theory - transculturalisation - where other forms of worlding are possible and possibly coexistent
• critique of documentary convention, historical authorship, utopian discourses of interactivity, groups positioned as having potential to redically alter conceptions of the past
• Raad info pp 204 - 206 resisting atrocity aesthetics of archives
• "The storied or fabular nature of historical knowledge--the meaningfulness given to fact--has been taken by new-media artists as a given, which they then wor on through their particular ethical, political, and aesthetic projects. While they are arguably artist-historiographers, whether working through public archives, classified documents, or otherwise about records or dominant formations of historical knowledge." (Lord in Lord, in Marchessault and Lord, 2007, 207)
• draw attention to silence (censorship, genocide, fear, etc)
• alternative history in the sense of including unconscious events of individuals (experiences and feelings) ** link to Cvetkovich