Digital visual culture. The history of spectacle The fairground The circus The magic show

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