Locations - dis - Media - Audiovisual Review

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 2002 by Are Flagan

Works by Dennis Del Favero, Agnes Hegedus, lan Howard, Susan Norrie, Jeffrey Shaw, Peter Weibel; Essays by Lev Manovich, Anna Munster, Peter Weibel Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001

Looking back at the flurry of new media formats that have come our way, it is perhaps not so surprising that few artistic projects beyond the Mb threshold have reached a sizeable audience. It appears that formats rarely stay around long enough to actually develop the audience and distribution associated with traditional publishing. How many artistic Video Discs, once touted as the wow-factor of data compression, were made beyond the novelty of Lorna? The problem is, despite museum initiatives telling us to reinterpret projects otherwise, that chunky new media works have a lifespan declining rapidly with the upgrade curve. CDs lost ground to the ease of the Web before they had a chance to gain momentum as a publishing platform, and now DVDs are taking another crack at gaining popular appeal through what has already become a prevalent encoding franchise.

Boxed with a book(let), this DVD set provides an investigation of narrative in as many forms and formats as it can muster. Essays by Lev Manovich, Anna Munster and Peter Weibel provide theoretical considerations for plotlines inspired by digital technology. Manovich offers a thorough analysis of how media organizes data and, consequently, structures user experience. Summarizing his findings, he stresses that mathematical and cognitive models from communication theory have neglected the more affective aspects of narrative. Munster takes issue with accounts that seek to associate or disassociate media with or from new or old distinctions to make history either a series of grand ruptures or a genealogical lifeline. Posited as differentiation or continuity, the contested models support their respective plans with utopian revolutionary moments or burdens of reactionary epistemes. Munster presents compelling examples and further thoughts on how the past may fold into the present and generate a set of useful, innova tive relations. Finally, Weibel traces narrative from ancient to contemporary through instances found in between. Promoting another, hardly novel, death of the author in the form of database-derived narratives, Weibel presents the reader turned user with possibilities of connection, selection and interpretation to compose a story line from the bitstream.

Partly due to how multimedia software compiles its auteurs in databases that are effectively assembled through the interactivity of the work, many new media projects behave like the dictionaries they resemble. The result is, arguably, that users rarely exhaust the programmed combinations or the provided resources before boredom strikes. Works included on this DVD offer a refreshing integration of new and old narrative forms by merging expectation and exploration to the extent that each access to the database is rewarded but not concluded to keep interest peaked. Although this structural recognition recalls the semantic treasures of each word and pairs interactivity rather plainly with reading, both the booklet and disc in this chest reinforce that the database, like the dictionary and the encyclopedia, is only a repository of figments feeding and grasping the imagination. My personal DVD favorite, then, would be Jeffrey Shaw's upside-down, down-under look at multicultural Melbourne in Place-Urbanity (2001), w hich features some mean compositing, expansive QTVR panoramas, several levels of interactivity, edifying social content and, not to forget, some good jokes.