Digital baroque : new media art and cinematic folds

330 Pages·2008·3.232 MB·English

by  Murray, Timothy

Digital Baroque
Electronic Mediations
Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors
26 Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds
Timothy Murray
25 Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path
Terry Harpold
24 Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now
Gary Hall
23 Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet
Lisa Nakamura
22 Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools
Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors
21 The Exploit: A Theory of Networks
Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker
20 Database Aesthetics
Victoria Vesna, Editor
19 Cyberspaces of Everyday Life
Mark Nunes
18 Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture
Alexander R. Galloway
17 Avatars of Story
Marie-Laure Ryan
16 Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi
Timothy C. Campbell
15 Electronic Monuments
Gregory L. Ulmer
14 Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine
Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky
13 The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory
Thomas Foster
12 Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory
Peter Krapp
For more books in the series, see page 311.
Digital Baroque
New Media Art and Cinematic Folds
timothy murray
26
Electronic Mediations, Volume
university of minnesota press
minneapolis london
•
Copyright2008by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Murray, Timothy.
Digital baroque : new media art and cinematic folds / Timothy Murray.
p. cm.—(Electronic mediations ; v. 26)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN978-0-8166-3401-9(hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8166-3402-6(pb : alk. paper)
1. Video recordings. 2. Digital video. 3. Installations (Art). 4. Civilization, Baroque. I. Title.
PN1992.945.M872008
791.4—dc22
2008030996
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For my life partners in the cinematic fold,
Renate, Ashley, and Erin
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contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction: Baroque Folds and
Digital Incompossibilities 1
I. From Video Black to Digital Baroque
1. Digital Baroque: Performative Passage
from Hatoum to Viola 35
2. Et in Arcadia Video: Poussin’ the Image of Culture
with Thierry Kuntzel and Louis Marin 58
II. Digital Deleuze: Baroque Folds of Shakespearean Passage
3. The Crisis of Cinema in the Age of New World-Memory:
The Baroque Legacy of Jean-Luc Godard 85
4. You Are How You Read: Baroque Chao-Errancy in
Greenaway and Deleuze 111
III. Present Past: Digitality, Psychoanalysis, and the
Memory of Cinema
5. Digitality and the Memory of Cinema: Bearing the
Losses of the Digital Code 137
6. Wounds of Repetition in the Age of the Digital:
Chris Marker’s Cinematic Ghosts 159
7. Philosophical Toys and Kaleidoscopes of the Unfamiliar:
The Haunting Voices of Toni Dove and Zoe Beloff 178
8. Digital Incompossibility: Cruising the Aesthetic Haze
of New Media 195
IV. Scanning the Future
9. Psychic Scansion: The Marker of the
Digital In-Between 217
10. Time @ Cinema’s Future: New Media Art
and the Thought of Temporality 238
Notes 261
Publication History 291
Index 293
Preface
Digital Baroque. What happens when two nouns, “the digital” and “the
Baroque,” are conjoined without articles to anchor them: digital/Baroque?
Does the one, “digital,” play the qualifying adjective to the weightier noun,
“Baroque”? Does the adjective signify something of the digit, the deictic,
the gestural, and the rhetorical nature of the Baroque, as in the baroque
trope faire voir?Or might the terms without their articles also stand juxta-
posed analogically in enigmatic difference: digital (,) Baroque or Baroque
(,) digital—something like 1 (,) 0? Perhaps they thus stand figurally as if
enfolded into one another, thereby signifying the paradox and enigma of
analogy itself. Might not we understand analogy as something not simply
transcended by digitality but as something deeply cryptic and disturbingly
disjunctive that is deeply crucial to digitality’s structure and representations?
As for digitality, is it even possible to distinguish the digital / the deictic from
the digital / the algebraic? Can we make a clean numerical break from the
rhetorical tradition?
The conceit of Digital Baroque multiplies when we add to this titular
mix the histories, thresholds, and memories of cinema, to which this book
gives particular attention, as they have been enfolded into new media art.
Does new media stand forth as the memento mori of cinema? Does the
Baroque function as a marker of the death of cinema in the twenty-first
century, as an energetic carrier of the figures of mourning, melancholia, and
even ascesis so fundamental to the Baroque? And what is implied by cin-
ema’s frequent identification with the Baroque, particularly by pioneering
ix