reading home work

N. Katherine Hayles

Todd Gannon

Virtual Architecture, Actual Media

Architectural studies boasts a wealth of material that examines the role of print, paper and

other analog media in forming and transforming architectural practice.1 While numerous

titles on the significance of digital media exist (for example, Beckman, Benedikt, Perry

and Hight, Poster, Castronova) that explore their impact on architectural production, no

definitive analysis has yet emerged. Indeed, given the rapid pace of change and the

development of new digital devices and applications, a definitive work on this topic may

never be possible. We offer this chapter as a gathering of resources and a framework

within which analyses may proceed. The work done on print media’s effects clearly

shows that medial effects go beyond architectural practice into such issues as the spread

of architectural ideas, the dissemination of architectural writing, and the formation of an

architectural canon of forms, styles, and components (for example, Colomina 1996,

Carpo 2001). Even this, however, is not a complete inventory. Media effects can be

explored in four distinct but interrelated areas: effects on how buildings are

conceptualized, effects on how buildings are constructed, effects on the subjectivities of

those who envision buildings, and effects on those presumed to inhabit the structures.

Given limitations of space, we will focus our analysis on the last two areas –

subjectivities of practitioners and assumptions about what constitutes the human, with

glances at environmental, spatial, technological, and cultural forces that most deeply

affect the transformations.

1 Pertinent studies include Colomina (1996), Carpo (2001), compilations by Colomina (1988),

Hart (1998), and Rattenbury (2002), among others.

First, some ground clearing on our central terms. Virtuality currently has two

central clusters of meanings, one deriving from virtual reality technologies (see Hillis

[1999] for a summary), the other from the influential Deleuzian concept of the virtual as

that which is in dynamic tension with the actual (Deleuze, 2005). Both these senses are

relevant to our discussion. We begin by offering the hypothesis that all architecture, built

or unbuilt, is virtual in the Deleuzian sense. Architecture, we propose, is not building, nor

is it some privileged subset of building. Rather, we posit architecture as an emergent

property of a range of media, buildings among them. It is that which makes building

meaningful to an on-going tradition. Not building itself, but, as the dictionary tells us, a

particular “art,” “science,” or “manner” of building; as Reyner Banham put it, “what

distinguishes architecture is not what is done … but how it is done” (Banham, 1996).

Further, we posit that architecture is a function of embodied discourse, that is, discourse

instantiated in speech or, more typically, written or graphical documents. “Document,” as

the term is used in textual studies, is distinct from “text” or “work” because it implies the

existence of a physical (or digital) object.

Just as all buildings hold within them the potential of becoming architecture, so

the documents that precede, surround, and follow buildings are constitutive players in

imagining, planning, and implementing architectural practices and thus also participate in

creating architecture. Embodied buildings and embodied documents are physical objects

witnessing to architectural acts, but architecture can never be reduced to these objects.

Rather, architecture partakes fundamentally of the virtual in the Deleuzian sense, a

nimbus of potentialities in dynamic interaction with the actuality of buildings and

documents. Both the virtuality of architecture and the physicality of documents and

buildings are real, but whereas documents and buildings are location-specific, comprising

myriad individual instances, architecture is malleable, dispersed, always in flux. As a

totality, architecture is ineffable, for as soon as it is written or built, it moves from the

virtual to the actual. The collective labor of the discipline acts as midwife to architecture,

moving from the raw materials of architectural actual media (whether buildings,

construction documents, or philosophical writings) and guiding the emergence of

architecture’s virtuality into the actuality of things we can read, touch, and traverse.

An important implication that follows from this view is the impact of media on

architecture. Like love, the term “media” evokes universal recognition, yet there is a

surprising lack of consensual definitions. For a field such as Communication Studies,

media mean communication technologies such as television, radio, and the Internet; for

Marshall McLuhan, media were famously configured as “extensions of man,” a definition

that cast telegraphy into the same bin as roads. For our purposes, we regard media as

materio-semiotic systems that enact the circulation of signs. A neologism coined by

Donna Haraway (among others), “materio-semiotic” connotes objects that partake both of

signifying practices and physical instantiation. An earthy example is provided by the

rural Midwest landscape one of us (NKH) knew as a child, a time when indoor plumbing

was ubiquitous but not quite universal. In that landscape, one occasionally encountered

outdoor privies, and not infrequently, visits to them revealed, in the form of a Sears

catalogue, the spirit of thriftiness that indelibly marked those who lived through the Great

Depression. A materio-semiotic object, the catalogue served a dual purpose: as one

lingered while waiting for certain biological processes to occur, it provided casual

reading material; later, its material properties (the tearability of the relatively cheap

paper, etc.) came to the foreground.

Media, as material systems conveying signs, have two principal strategies at their

disposal: circulating signs through people, and circulating people through signs.

Typically documents are identified with the first strategy and buildings with the second.

Library books circulate among people, for example, while Gothic cathedrals functioned

as sign systems through which people circulated as they performed liturgical rituals. The

history of books and buildings shows many other possible combinations of strategies.

Medieval codices were often chained to podiums, so that it was the people who moved

while the books were stationary. Conversely, as Robert Venturi has taught us (Venturi,

Brown, and Izenour, 1977), buildings may be designed to be seen from moving cars, so

from a relativistic perspective that takes the viewer’s position as constant, the buildings

circulate while the person remains sitting in her seat.

Considering both documents and buildings as media—that is, as materio-semiotic

systems—has multiple advantages. Defamiliarizing the usual categories that parse

buildings as durable architectural entities and documents as ephemera, the medial

perspective articulated above encourages interpretations that link semiotic functions to

material actualities, so that buildings and books are neither reduced only to discursive

entities nor to material objects. Another advantage inheres in the new configurations that

emerge when the usual dichotomy between built and paper architecture is broken down

and replaced by more flexible and dynamic interactions between virtuality and actuality.

As media change – for example, from print-based documents to digital files – the

dynamic between architecture’s virtuality and the medium’s actuality changes

accordingly, often with dramatic effects. Virtual architecture, those unbuilt or

unbuildable digital constructions of the contemporary generation, becomes not a pseudo-

architecture suffering from a lack of physicality but rather an essential architecture

unencumbered by physicality. Virtual architecture does not operate outside the pale of the

discipline in a lesser realm of the unbuilt (the design equivalent of the undead), as many

detractors have insisted. Rather architecture, by virtue of its dynamic interaction with

actual media, infuses the physicality of the written and the built with the infinite potential

of the virtual. Inhering at the very heart of the discipline, architecture’s ineffability,

unspeakable as such, is the reservoir that renews the discipline and makes innovation

possible.

VIRTUALITY AND MEDIUM SPECIFICITY
One cannot develop a critical theory of new media if one begins from the assumption that
they are somehow immaterial (Poster, 2006, 56).

The rise of the virtual, stimulating a renewed consideration of material specificity,

has catalyzed new interpretations of materiality. Matthew Kirschenbaum (2005, 2008),

for example, has distinguished between forensic and formal materiality. Materiality,

referring to the artifactual nature of an object, should not be confused with physicality.

As we have argued elsewhere (Hayles, 2005), an object has a potentially infinite array of

physical attributes. One could, for example, refer to the chemical composition of ink

when discussing print technology, and beyond that to the molecular components, their

energy states, etc. Physicality alone, then, is insufficient to specify an object. Rather,

certain physical attributes are typically of interest in a given circumstance—say, the

colors associated with the chemicals in ink. Materiality expresses this conjunction of

attention and attributes, focus and physicality. Attention shifts, focus changes, and

materiality transforms. Always embedded in an overt or implied context, materiality, far

from being given by an object’s physicality, is an emergent event.

Kirschenbaum’s formulation of formal and forensic materiality builds on this idea

and carries it further by distinguishing between the material substrate of computer

technologies (forensic materiality) and the formal sign systems that constitute computer

codes (formal materiality). Reconfiguring the usual dichotomy of hardware and software

by incorporating their material properties into the definitions, Kirschenbaum draws

attention to issues of scale and contingency. Just as any artifact can be parsed in an

infinite number of ways, so any two apparently identical artifacts can be seen to differ if

the scale of observation is small enough. Two boards, for example, may be judged the

same size, but drop to a smaller scale—millimeters rather than inches, nanometers rather

than millimeters—and differences previously undetectable become observable.

Kirschenbaum illustrates the point by taking a CD-ROM to a nanotechnology laboratory,

where a scanning tunneling microscope reveals very slight irregularities in the bit

patterns. Although we are accustomed to say that information is infinitely and exactly

reproducible, this is true only within given tolerances. Along with a context of attention,

materiality implicitly references a context of measurement from which observations are

generated. Consequently, materiality has borderlands in which it can be transformed,

either by a shift of attention or a shift of scale. Like the coastline of Britain in Benoit

Mandelbrot’s well-known example (1983), materiality cannot be specified in advance

and without reference to context, for social, cultural, and psychological aspects interact

with technical specifications.

Complementing and complicating this idea of forensic materiality is formal

materiality, which in Kirschenbaum’s formulation consists of the processes or behaviors

in which a computational object engages. Just as one bit is not identical to another bit

when the scale of observation is small enough, so the codes that the computer executes

may have idiosyncrasies that testify to their origin’s historical circumstances, as

Kirschenbaum (2008) demonstrates by finding the kernel of an older computer game

embedded within the code of a newer one. As with forensic materiality, formal

materiality has social, cultural, and psychological dimensions as well as technical ones.

Thus both formal and forensic materialities are inherently emergent; in Bruno Latour’s

terms (2007), they are nature/culture hybrids. As emergent entities, they are path-

dependent; they have histories, and these histories mark their materiality in ways that

break open simple categories such as one and zero bits or executable and not executable

code. The material entities become individuals capable of revealing their stories when

interrogated with the proper (i.e., forensic) techniques.

What changes when we move from hardware and software to formal and forensic

materiality? From the outset the emergent nature of forensic and formal materiality

makes clear that multiple recursive feedback loops cycle between physicality and

sociality, media as technical objects and social processes. Adrian Mackenzie (2006) has

convincingly argued that software construction is an intensely social process. The

framework sketched above broadens this insight to include the technical functioning,

social practices and media representations of architectural work. Researchers may

understandably choose to focus on a particular aspect of a multiple recursive cycle (as for

example Friedrich Kittler does in his emphasis on hardware in such essays as “There is

No Software” [1997a] and “Protected Mode” [1997b]), but in our view it is a mistake to

fetishize any one component as if it alone could explain the dynamics of a complex

system. As Donald M. Lowe shows (1995), social, economic, and technological factors

work together to form “the body” in late-capitalist USA. Take, as another example, our

claim above that attention is a co-specifying factor in the emergent dynamics shaping

which aspects of physicality become materiality. This might seem to privilege attention

as the determining component. Attention itself, however, has historical and culturally

specific dimensions that spring from the effects of media and other technologies, as

numerous studies have shown. Jonathan Crary’s Suspensions of Perception (2001) traces

the emergence of attention as a medical and industrial concern and explores the complex

dynamic between its creation and dissolution; Wolfgang Schivelbush’s The Railway

Journey (1986) demonstrates the effects of rail travel on modes of attention in the late

nineteenth and early twentieth century; and Steven Johnson (2006) and we (Hayles,

2007) have argued for the effects on attention of contemporary media. To engage a richer

sense of the complex dynamics that co-determine media specificity, interactions

throughout the system should be understood as entwined with and mutually affecting one

another.

Media specificity has been a minority interest in the humanities for most of the

twentieth century, with the long dominance of print inducing a kind of somnolence in this

regard. (An important exception is textual studies, which has typically engaged with what

Jerome McGann [2001] has called “bibliographic codes,” that is, the material aspects of

texts). All this changed, however, with the rapid development of networked and

programmable media in the later twentieth century. Signs of crisis are now everywhere

apparent as the humanities struggle to come to terms with the importance of media

specificity in composition, publishing, credentialing, and a host of other areas.

Architecture has been significantly in advance of other areas of the human sciences in

investigating interactions between architecture and the objects, subjects, contexts and

media that conspire to produce it. A convenient example can be found in Robin Evans’s

widely read 1986 essay, “Translations from Drawing to Building” (1986).2

Evans’s text relates a simple tale: the constructed dome of the Royal Chapel at

Anet (1547-52) by Philibert de l’Orme does not match the drawing of it inscribed in the

pavement below nor does their relationship match de l’Orme’s description of it in his

Premier tome de l’architecture (1567). For Evans, these differences do not signal a

deficiency in the work, a failure on the part of the architect to translate precisely an

architectural concept from one medium to another; rather, the case reveals the differences

between the various media (drawings, books, and buildings) that were deployed to

produce the architecture in question, as well as the way in which those differences

condition and inflect it.

De l’Orme’s work hinges on a consonance between the two-dimensional, three-

dimensional, and textual instantiations of a complex geometrical pattern, a consonance

that Evans’s analysis demonstrates to be incorrect geometrically. The work may look like

a virtuoso feat of projective geometry (and in fact it is), but this feat was not executed as

advertised. Constructing an alibi for de l’Orme, Evans surmises that the architect fudged

the floor paving, cropping the aesthetically inferior portions at the projection’s edges and

scaling up the entire pattern to produce an effect that more closely resembled that of the

2 As Evans’ text is discussed at length elsewhere in this volume, we will limit our discussion to a

few salient points. For a fuller treatment, see Christopher Hight, “Manners of Working: Architectural
Tactics of Subterfuge and Evasion in Digital Based Design.”

dome above. De l’Orme’s adjustments can be seen as an extension of the ancient Greek

practices of visual correction (entasis, the modulation of column spacing, etc.), which

likewise torqued, stretched, and adjusted elements to produce a more convincing

appearance of their being parallel, perpendicular, evenly spaced, or plumb.3 Evans

demonstrates that de l’Orme’s corrective adjustments extend into the Premier tome as

well, which similarly values the effect of rigorous method over its actual application. We

might append de l’Orme’s triumphant finish, “…forming by this means compartments

that are plumb and perpendicular above the plan of the said chapel,”4 with ‘but this didn’t

look quite right, so we cropped off the outer, ugly bits and made the whole thing bigger.’

The addition, while ruining the text’s rhetorical effect, would nevertheless have the

salutary effect, important for our argument, of revealing the transformational effects of

translating between and among media.

In each mediated instantiation of the chapel – the constructed dome, the patterned

floor, du Cerceau’s engraved drawings, de l’Orme’s printed text, Evans’s diagrams and

photographs – the architectural effect of dizzying geometrical precision was crafted and

modulated according to the specific media through which that effect was produced. In the

end, we understand that these effects at Anet issue not from a single source but rather

from the dynamic interaction of the building’s materiality with its myriad mediated

representations, as well as with the architect(s) that produces it and the perceiving

subjects that engage it.5 Like writing, each of the media involved made possible and also

3 For a discussion of visual correction in ancient Greek architecture, see Coulton, (1977).
4 De l’Orme (1567, 112), quoted by Evans (1986, 191).
5 It is interesting to note that Evans produced his analysis of the Royal Chapel without having

visited the building, and relied only on mediated representations to develop his argument. Further, his
subsequent visit to the chapel compelled him to add a postscript in which he slightly altered his findings,
based as much on his visit as on additional photographs he took while there. See Evans, (1986, 188).

precluded specific inflections of the thoughts they embody. In many cases, media

deployed by architects give rise to ideas that are thinkable only through those media;

recall, for instance of Peter Eisenman’s cunning redrawing of Le Corbusier’s Maison

Domino. Originally published by the Swiss-French architect as a two-point perspective,

the image was re-drawn by Eisenman as a series of axonometric diagrams (Eisenman,

2004). This translation of an iconic drawing from one style of projection to another

opened the simple form to a host of new interpretations.

Another avenue along which this line of thinking might develop is architectural

photography. Migrating built form to the printed page through the lens of the camera,

with its cultural affiliations with truthful representation, made possible modes of

architectural thinking unavailable to drawing or writing. Truth travels in step with fiction,

producing productive slippages between assumed facts and media representations. As

pointed out by Beatriz Colomina, photography and its attendant body of techniques can

manipulate reality as much as reflect it. “Rather than represent reality, it produces a new

reality” (Colomina, 1996, 80). Colomina goes on to demonstrate in her interpretation of

Le Corbusier’s serial redrawing of postcards that these new realities signify not as a

function of single images but rather through their accumulation and relation to other

media: “a photograph does not have specific meaning in itself but rather in its

relationship to other photographs, the caption, the writing, and the layout of the page”

(Colomina, 1996, 93-100).

As photography is multiplied in film and made infinitely malleable with digital

technologies, these potential “new realities” are likewise multiplied, and with them their

available interactions with other media and their potential to produce new forms of

architectural thinking. Let us return for a moment to Eisenman’s representations of the

Maison Domino (Eisenman, 2004; Figures 1 and 2). Here, Eisenman uses an abstract

drawing technique to produce a series of spare interpretations of Corbusier’s already

stripped-down original. Taken together, Eisenman’s drawings produce an effect of

teleological development, an implied history of a primitive form’s articulation over time.

This effect is particularly effective rendered as an axonometric, which imposes a three-

dimensional framework revealing spatial relations while retaining dimensional

congruence. The argument instantiated in Corbusier’s more realistic perspective would

occlude much of the essential information.6 Over a series of projects through the 1970s

and into the present, Eisenman developed this technique further in analyses of the work

of Guiseppe Terragni as well as in his own work, producing a series of projects that

adopted a narrative syntax to produce the effect of the serial elaboration of primitive

forms over time (Eisenman, 1999 and 2003). With the advent of 3D computer modeling

and animation software in the 1990s, such serial elaborations were possible not only in

far greater degrees of complexity but also with much higher frame refresh rates. From Le

Corbusier’s single iconic image to Eisenman’s step-by-step transformations to Greg

Lynn’s fluid animations, we see the persistent development through various media of

architecture as a specific narrative discourse, the articulation of which is only possible

through the specific media that produce it. Coupling these digital animations with

soundtracks, live actors, and cinematic techniques, firms operating outside the discipline

of architecture such as Imaginary Forces push this discourse still further in their

development of architectural pre-visualizations and what has been called “experience

6 This observation was often pointed out in graduate seminars led by Robert Somol at both Ohio

State and UCLA, but we know of no published essay in which these thoughts are recorded.

design” (see Krakowsky, 2007). The perceivable effects of this discourse do not inhere

solely within the objects produced, regardless of whether those objects take the form of

buildings, drawings, computer animations, or texts. Rather, these effects obtain from the

dynamic interactions that arise in the virtual space between the various media that

embody them and the perceiving subjects that engage them.

NEW MEDIA AS ARCHITECTURE

Over the past twenty years, digital technologies have perpetrated a fundamental

transformation not only of architectural working methods, but also of the kind of work

architects produce and the manner in which that work is interpreted and discussed. Shifts

in attention from form to surface, from objects to atmosphere, from meaning to mood,

and from critical to post-critical (or projective) practice have been advanced by critics

and historians from all camps as symptoms of a more general move away from a

discursive paradigm centered upon stable objects and legible meaning to one concerned

primarily with fluid environments, ephemeral effects, and ambiguous moods.7 While

others, such as Robert Venturi, have attempted to situate new technologies within old

regimes of signification and iconography, we eschew his tendency to cast architecture

and media as opposing forces.8 While architecture might emerge from the interaction of

iconography and electronics with generic buildings in the work of Venturi and others, in

7 The literature on this pervasive phenomenon is vast. For a sampling of the more influential

works on the subject, see Riley (1995), Kipnis (2002), Somol and Whiting (2002), Speaks (2002), Lavin
(2004), and Baird (2004). Our own contribution focuses on the role digital design technologies play in
these shifts in focus (Gannon and Hayles, 2007). Elsewhere in this volume, Stefan Al and Shiloh Krupar
outline what they see as a shift from object to atmosphere in the development of corporate “brandscapes.”
See their “Notes on the Society of the Spectacle Brand.”

8 Venturi’s position regarding the role of symbolic form was famously advanced in Learning from
Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown, and Izenour, 1977) and has been developed to incorporate electronic
display technologies in Venturi (1996).

our view, more interesting work is being done by firms committed not to a conceptual

separation of digital media and built form but rather to their seamless integration.

The New York office of Diller, Scofidio and Renfro has long been at the forefront

of integrating technology and virtuality in architecture as well as in extending

architectural practice into neighboring disciplines such as gallery art, theater, and film.

The firm’s precocious facility with virtual effects as well as the trademark elements of

their work may be attributed to their long history of collaboration with the theater and

stage production. In contrast to the earnest monumentality of architectural form, the

theater deals unapologetically in artifice, regularly deploying actual construction and

virtual projection to construct its illusions. DS+R operates in a similar fashion, and

recurrent elements in their projects recall standard theatrical elements and tropes. Their

famous mechanical apparatuses, for example, evoke the ad-hoc mechanical tackle of the

theater fly-space. Their aggressive use of architectural drawing conventions (plan and

section projections, linear perspective, etc.) to manipulate spatial perception corresponds

to the intermingling of architectural technique and theatrical illusion described in early

treatises ranging from Vitruvius to Alberti and illustrated in Mannerist examples such as

Palladio’s Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza or Scamozzi’s Teatro di Sabionetta. In theater as

in the work of DS+R, mechanical and projective devices, from illusionistically painted

sets to the split and distorted perspectival recessions of the scena per angolo to Diller and

Scofidio’s early deployment of angled mirrors,9 come together to produce a range of

virtual effects that confound the distinctions between the actual and the virtual and in

recent works have become the primary locus of their architectural experimentation.

9 For a discussion of the importation of these illusionistic techniques into historical architecture,

see Oechslin, (1984). We are indebted to Sylvia Lavin for fruitful discussions on the theater, architecture,
and Diller and Scofidio as well as for directing our attention to Oechslin’s essay.

This tendency is apparent in such hallmark projects as their production design for

“The Rotary Notary and His Hot Plate” of 1987 (Figure 3). Drawing inspiration from

Marcel Duchamp, Diller and Scofidio devised an apparatus composed of an opaque

screen that divided the stage parallel to the proscenium and a mirror fixed at 45 degrees

that revealed a plan view of the concealed space to the audience.10 Viewed head-on (and

in the most commonly published photographs), the apparatus effectively flattens into a

single plane akin to an elevation drawing, reproducing the gendered separation of bride’s

and bachelor’s domains of Duchamp’s “Grande Verre” while producing a multiplication

of the performance space that unleashes a panoply of illusory potential. Moving into the

concealed area of the stage displaces the actor’s bodies into the virtual space of the mirror

apparatus where they are rendered weightless, fragmented, and dismembered. Diller and

Scofidio honed their techniques and expanded their repertoire to include video

projections in a series of theatrical productions through the 1990s,11 as well as in

installations such as Para-Site at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1989),

Loophole at the Second Artillery Armory of Chicago (1992), and in projects such as the

Slow House on Long Island (unfinished, 1992) and the Brasserie at the Seagram Building

in New York (2000). In each case, carefully positioned cameras and video monitors

displaying both real-time and time-delayed imagery produced on-site as well as remotely,

displace and multiply architectural spaces, producing jarring spatial and temporal

juxtapositions heightened by their architectural constructions but impossible to achieve

through strictly mechanical means. Too, the firm devised complex presentations of each

work, from armatures that blurred distinctions between drawings, models, and the

10 The project, and Liz Diller’s 1987 discussion of it at the Architectural Association in London, is

reproduced in Diller and Scofidio (1994, 103-134).
11 For a documentation of these projects and an illuminating essay, see Goldberg (2003).

structures designed to support them in earlier works to clever combinations of analog and

digital representational techniques in later presentations. The firm’s work developed in

scope and ambition through the 1990s and into this century alongside rapid advances in

digital technologies, and the office remains at the forefront of experimentation with them

that re-imagines the affective potential of architectural projects as well as the technical

scope of architectural practice.

Perhaps the firm’s most ambitious attempt at integrating digital technologies and

physical construction is their Blur Building at Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland (2002,

Figure 4). To construct an artificial cloud on the grounds of Swiss Expo ‘02, the firm

employed digital technologies in concert with analog techniques through all stages of

conceptualization, design, construction, and operation. Their use of these techniques,

from the fusions of analog and digital drawing methods in presentation materials to the

integration of computer controlled weather sensors to modulate the complex fog

generation system on the project, is well known and widely published. The project’s

dissemination in other media, from extensive publication in the popular and scholarly

press to the use of its imagery in contemporary products ranging from telephone cards to

chocolate bars, has also been noted (see Diller and Scofidio, 2002). For the present

discussion, the project’s unrealized digital components, which aim to eradicate the

boundary between virtual and actual spatial environments, are most pertinent.

In the indeterminate space of the Blur Building, familiar architectural depth cues

were to be all but erased by the mist. To compensate for diminished visual stimuli,

alternative modes of spatial orientation were to have been made available through

digitally controlled sound and light effects. As the Blur Building developed, the firm and

its many collaborators experimented with a number of integrated media components,

from scrolling LED text displays to automated ‘braincoats’ to interactive online controls,

most of which were eliminated due to budget constraints from the final built work. We

have noted previously the unfortunate lacunae their absence left in the experience of the

built work (Gannon, 2002), but, as has been noted by Mark B. N. Hansen, “in addition to

being a temporary built project in the world, the Blur Building exists as a work of

embodied conceptual art preserved in the archive of traces that document its making and

that include – as a central core of its drama – the media components” (Hansen 2006b,

280). While these unrealized media components did not inflect the constructed spectacle

at Yverdon-les-Bains, they are essential to an understanding of the full architectural

significance of the Blur Building and point to the burgeoning potential of architecture

born out of the interpenetration of new and old media.

Offering much needed protection from the cool mist of the pavilion, Diller and

Scofidio’s digitally enhanced braincoats open up new avenues of social interaction and

spatial organization. (Figure 5) Upon arriving at the pavilion, visitors were to complete a

simple questionnaire meant to divine specific personality traits, the answers to which

were then uploaded to a central database and to the individual’s braincoat. Sensors and

transmitters embedded in the coats would communicate with each other as visitors moved

through the space, causing visual, aural, and mechanical transformations to the coat based

on proximity to other coats and the programmed information they carried. As a visitor

wandering in the mist approached another visitor who had given similar answers to the

questionnaire, the system would signal a potential affinity by shifting the color intensity

of each coat toward green and increasing the frequency of audio pulses emitted by the

coat. Contrasting answers would elicit an antipathetic response signaled by a red hue, and

exact matches would trigger a vibrating sensation in the coat, “mimicking the tingle of

excitement that comes with physical attraction” (Diller and Scofidio, 2002, 217).

The results of this new spatial experiment remain unknown. Like minded visitors

might have attracted one another, causing a segregation of inhabitants based on

personality that would have resulted in uniform clusters of glowing green coats and rapid

aural pulses. Alternatively, visitors might have been turned off by their supposed

matches, causing those with similar profiles to repel one another. This might have led to

an ironic arrangement of mismatched personalities seeking the comfort of strangers in the

closest proximity to one another. More likely, of course, would have been an oscillating

swarm of rising and falling pulse tones and a full spectrum of glowing coats as individual

visitors pursued individual agendas and entered and exited the system at varying rates – a

field of peripatetic denizens blushing, beeping, and vibrating their way through an

otherworldly milieu.

In another aborted embellishment, the pavilion was to be equipped with PTZ

cameras capable of being controlled by virtual visitors experiencing the space through the

internet. While these visitors would not have been able directly to enjoy the full range of

physical sensations and alternative social opportunities offered by the braincoats, they

would have been afforded a remote view of the spectacle as well as an opportunity to

affect the content of the LED displays (and perhaps, by extension, the behavior of the

visitors at Yverdon) through interaction with web-based interfaces. As such, the Blur

Building would have inhabited the virtual space of the Internet as it simultaneously

occupied the physical space over Lake Neuchâtel, with its virtual and actual visitors

likewise occupying multiple positions in the manifold virtual instantiations of the space

projected around the globe by the Internet.

While budgetary constraints precluded the inclusion of these elements in

Yverdon, other projects demonstrate the potential of active digital media on architectural

design. Linking integrated sensors to computer-controlled lighting elements, Toyo Ito’s

1986 Tower of Winds in Yokohama transformed contextual data into “environmental

music” expressed in constantly changing light patterns.12 Greg Lynn’s Embryological

House project (2000) invites clients to participate in the design process through an

interactive website.13 More recently, the D-Tower by Lars Spuybroek and artist Q.S.

Serafin combines physical construction with web-based components to produce a hybrid,

interactive work that colorfully maps the collective emotional state of a small Dutch

town.14 Younger practices such as Höweler+Yoon, servo, Xeferotarch and others

routinely combine digital technologies with physical construction to produce architectural

works impossible to consider in a strictly analog terms. Far exceeding Venturi’s call for a

generic architecture adorned with electronic signage, these works (in all their varied

instantiations) guide the emergence of an aggressively intermediated architecture that

choreographs a complex, integrated ensemble of physical construction, virtual simulation,

and pervasive interaction of human subjects and intelligent machines.

12 See Riley (1995), pp. 132-133.
13 The project was exhibited at the 7th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2000 and can be

accessed at www.embryologicalhouse.com.
14 See www.d-toren.nl.

http://www.embryologicalhouse.com/

http://www.d-toren.nl/

VIRTUALITY AND NOTIONS OF HUMAN SUBJECTIVITY

I am teaching a design studio at UCLA. A student has been working on a 3D model of a

building and is walking me through the latest changes. It is an early summer afternoon in

Southern California and the studios, designed with analog drafting in mind, are bathed in

natural light. The sun’s glare makes it difficult for me to see the image on the screen, so I

ask the student to turn it toward me so that I might get a better view. A second later,

without lifting a hand, she asked, “Is that better?” Flummoxed, I reply, “You didn’t move

anything.” Her right wrist flicks the mouse almost imperceptibly, and the 3D image on

the screen rotates about its vertical axis. “How about now?” I reach forward and turn

the monitor myself.

Two generations peer at the screen, the older seeing the screen in space, the

younger the screen as space. Such anecdotes pepper the literature surrounding the advent

of digital technologies in design studios through the 1990s to the present. As more robust

platforms and projects such as Second Life come online, these occurrences have become

increasingly commonplace. While virtual spaces in built work are only beginning to alter

the architectural environment, the virtual spaces in which work is produced have been

fully assimilated into workplace practices and, increasingly, into leisure time as well.

These professional and leisure practices have had dramatic effects not only on architects

but also on artists, writers, and cultural critics. In the cultural imaginary, the virtual in

architecture, in vibrant conversation with the actual media of networked and

programmable machines, leaps ahead of present construction to envision a built world in

which simulated overlays merge seamlessly with actual buildings to create mixed reality

environments inhabited by augmented humans.

Such a world is given pride of place in Vernon Vinge’s speculative fiction

Rainbows End, where it is imagined so vividly and pervasively that it almost qualifies as

the novel’s protagonist. In Vinge’s near-future world, buildings are quite plain and even

ugly, for they are not designed to be seen in themselves but rather to function as

underpinnings onto which virtual overlays are projected.15 They are in this sense

malleable, mutating as the projections change; Juan, a student at Fairmont High School,

notices that the “buildings were mostly three stories today. Their gray walls were like

playing cards stacked in a rickety array” (50). There would indeed be little sense in

creating elaborate exteriors when what the eye perceives comes not from the building but

the computer. Programmable gear provides the projections, texturing, and detailing that

transform surfaces into whatever the user has fashioned in his or her wearable. Visions

are shared either through VR projections or directly as digital files. Users thus become

instant collaborators with architects, creating custom visual effects that advertise their

virtuosity in manipulating digital information.

The cumulative effects on human culture and subjectivity are profound. The

novel’s putative protagonist, Robert Gu, is an older man who had been a world-class poet

before he descended into the deep twilight of Alzheimer’s. Rescued from darkness by

medical advances, he re-awakens to a contemporary world in which most people around

him are living in a mixed reality that he can enter only through arduous re-education. The

plot foregrounds how class has been reconfigured; the emphasis is no longer on the haves

15 In many ways, Vinge’s fiction follows Venturi’s lead toward generic buildings adorned with

electronic iconography. But as we will see below, his projection of Venturi’s ideas into a dystopian near
future gives rise to consequences well beyond the intentions of Venturi’s graphic urbanism.

and have-nots but on the digitally facile and digitally obtuse. Just as in former times one

was required performatively to display a certain class, gender, and race to have access to

a gentleman’s club, so now the elite are defined by their skills in manipulating the

wearables that create the environments to which other people respond.

The ornate surfaces created by VR projections cover over architectural

infrastructures permeated by computational devices. In contrast to their unremarkable

exteriors, buildings have remarkable functionalities that, invisible to casual inspection,

bestow smart capabilities that make them something like intelligent entities in their own

right. “Cryptic machines are everywhere nowadays,” Gu thinks. “They lurked in walls,

nestled in trees, even littered the lawns. They worked silently, almost invisibly, twenty-

four hours a day. He began to wonder where it all ended” (75). Such is the retrofitted

Geisel Library at the University of California at San Diego campus, whose infrastructure

includes stabilizers enabling the building to absorb earthquake tremors by counter-

movements that ensure continuing stability. A climax arrives when the digital stabilizers

are hijacked by a mysterious hacker (who may be, the narrative hints, an emergent virtual

entity produced spontaneously by the network’s complexity). In answer to a challenge

from a rival faction, the hacker literally makes the building walk by converting the

stabilizers’ counter-measures into coherent directionality. The scene underscores the

complexity of agency when it is distributed among embodied individuals, non-human

agents, and actual buildings and media.

The novel dramatizes effects documented in a host of non-fictional studies,

including rapid technological change and the concomitant obsolescence (Sterling, 2005;

Harvey, 1992); global microsociality emerging from a combination of instantaneous

transnational communication and the exigencies of local times and places (Knorr-Cetina

and Bruegger, 2002); crowd sourcing (Howe, 2006), here envisioned as “affliances,”

short-term contracts establishing relationships between citizens and corporations for

temporary cooperation on a project; government power at once centralized and exercised

through distributed networks (Galloway and Thacker, 2007); and conspiracies that thrive

on asymmetric warfare (Der Derian, 2001). Subjectivity is not about interiority expressed

through verbal constructions (metaphorized in the poet protagonist, who finds he has lost

his gift to make words sing) but about manipulating information so that it forms a

pervasive real-time interface with everyday life. Human intelligence has been so

thoroughly integrated with intelligence augmentation technologies that “media,” properly

conceived, are no longer external affordances but integrated systems rippling across

multiple artifactual and biological interfaces (Thacker, 2004).

This near-future scenario lies on a trajectory that stretches back at least as far as

the early years of the twentieth century. Writing on the influence of media, particulary

film and photography, on Le Corbusier’s architecture, Beatriz Colomina notes that “to

inhabit” means “to inhabit the camera. But the camera is not a traditional place, it is a

system of classification, a kind of filing cabinet. ‘To inhabit’ means to employ that

system” (Colomina, 1996, 323). Similarly, “to inhabit” the structures in Rainbows End

means to occupy the systems of classification and protocols that enable information to

flow smoothly along the networks. Working from the extensive materials in Le

Corbusier’s archives, Colomina shows that “the traditional humanist figure, the inhabitant

of the house, is made incidental to the camera eye; it comes and goes, it is merely a

visitor” (329). Architectural elements, particularly windows, are consistently

superimposed with contemporary media: “Telephone, cable, radios . . . machines for

abolishing time and space. Control is now in these media” (332). Colomina argues that

“the window in the age of mass communication provides us with one more flat image.

The window is a screen” (334). Further along the trajectory, the screen in Rainbows End

leaps out of the frame and projects directly onto ambient surfaces, dynamically engaging

with and indeed co-creating environments. The novel performs a world consonant with

Anthony Vidler’s observation that “contemporary subject identity, if it is optical at all,

finds its subject in screens, in clouded surfaces, in the indeterminacy of non-perspectival

structure” (2006, 135).

What, then, of contemporary subjectivity? Writing about the earlier twentieth

century, Colomina concludes that “a dematerialization” follows from “the emerging

media. The organizing geometry of architecture skips from the perspectival cone of

vision, from the humanist eye, to the camera angle. It is precisely in this slippage that

modern architecture becomes modern by engaging with the media” (334). Architecture in

the present and near future, however, does more than displace the “traditional humanist

figure.” Rather, it incorporates the individual (or as Deleuze says, the ‘dividual’) as a

node in a global network of interconnectivity that promiscuously mingles human with

non-human agency, local embodiments with global communication flows, virtual

overlays with actual buildings and media.

HOW TO FASHION A PRO-HUMAN POSTHUMANISM
If there is to be a new urbanism it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and
omnipotence, it will be the staging of uncertainty, it will no longer be concerned with the
arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with
potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling
fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form . . it
will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for
endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions—the
reinvention of psychological space (Koolhaas,1995, 969).

As we confront the issue of contemporary subjectivity, it is worth remembering

that humans have been co-evolving with technology almost from the beginning of the

species. This complex co-evolutionary spiral has aptly been called technogenesis

(Hansen, 2006a; Stiegler, 1998), producing and produced by the complex feedback loops

whereby the production of new tools creates new visions of human being, which leads to

new environments, which puts selective pressure on some features and enhances others,

which leads to different practices and related ontogenic changes, which in turn stimulates

the creation of yet more tools. As Deleuze has remarked (1995, 178) the pertinent

question ought not to be whether the present era is better or worse than what came before

(a question impossible to answer comprehensively). Rather, we might better ask what

opportunities for constructive interventions are presented to us by our information-

intensive environments. One way into the question is to take seriously objections raised

to our posthuman condition and consider carefully how undesirable effects can be

mitigated and salutary effects enhanced.

The traditional humanist subject was seen as having a body, but (at least in the

philosophical tradition) that body was reductively viewed as a support system for the all-

important rational mind, as has been shown, among others, by Elizabeth Grosz in Volatile

Bodies (1994) and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Philosophy in the Flesh (1999).

With the advent of cyberspace, enthusiasts made extravagant claims for leaving the body

behind, and transhumanists such as Ray Kurzweil (2006) confidently looked forward to

the near future when the body could either be extensively re-engineered for radical life

extension or, in Hans Moravec’s visions (1990; 2000), dispensed with altogether by

uploading consciousness into a computer. In light of such fantasies, we can sympathize

with Francis Fukuyama’s warning (2006) that there is a human nature and we mess with

it at our peril, or Arie Graafland’s important comment that we have “finally lost all

ground” (2006, 156). “What gets lost here,” Graafland continues, “is corporeality in a

threefold way: three bodies are lost at the same time, the territorial body of the planet and

ecology, and social body or socius, and our human body” (156). Graafland is correct but

only in theory—that is, in reference to theories that erase the enduring biological

inheritance we call the body and all the richly sedimented behaviors, inclinations, and

proclivities it encodes, chief among them the desire to socialize with other humans, the

origin of socius.

Graafland and others who want to resist contemporary erasures of the body may

ironically participate in the very movements they would contest, for they accept as given

problematic claims from which they extrapolate a dire state of affairs. For example, in

arriving at the above conclusion, Graafland cites Chirstine Boyer to the effect that “in the

Cartesian world of computers there is no longer any reference to the body” (Boyer, 1996,

117). This statement is both true and false—true if one focuses only on logic gates,

idealized bit patterns, and so forth, but false if one considers the full range of affordances

in networked and programmable machines, which include multiple body interfaces from

the GUI to the mouse and extensive software packages designed specifically with human

perceptual systems in mind, for example PET scans and functional magnetic resonance

images. Moreover, computers themselves have bodies in the sense of being instantiated

entities. As we saw earlier with forensic materiality, these bodies bear the marks of

specific histories that place them within social, economic, and political contestations. As

Kirschenbaum remarks, “[computers] are material machines dedicated to propagating a

behavioral illusion, or call it a working model, of immateriality” (2005, 5) We should not,

however, be seduced into taking this illusion for reality. Materiality introduces difference,

and difference opens the way for the contingent, the unexpected, the aleatory.

This is the crucial missing point in Boyer’s later argument in “The Body in the

City: A Discourse on Cyberscience” (2006), which gives a solid account of first and

second order cybernetics but in its conclusion accepts ideal abstractions as reality.

Discussing artificial life and emergence, she argues that “this model ushers in by the back

door via its bio-social episteme a totalizing desire for omnipotence as a post-humanist

fabricator of artificial life or generic cites. Followed to the extreme, signs in this second

cybernetics engender the capacity of complex systems to alter, modify, and develop their

own programs controlling life and death decisions. This is what ‘second-order’

emergence is all about” (Boyer, 2006, 47). Such a conclusion erases an important aspect

of emergence: once evolutionary processes are given a chance to work, they may well

produce something no one expected, including those who engineered the evolutionary

programs. As materio-semiotic actors, artificial life programs can and do exploit small

differences in materialities to enact path-dependent trajectories entirely different from

those their creators imagined.

What one makes of these unexpected events is an open-ended question that cannot

be answered by referring solely to the technology; the emergent result is radically under-

determined with respect to the technology and therefore susceptible to a wide range of

interpretations and interventions. John Cage, for example, sought in “chance operations”

(his version of emergence) a release from the limits of the ego and an opening out of

human consciousness to the inconceivable diversity that lies all around us, if only we

have the mindsets and orientations to perceive it. Gregory Bateson (whom Boyer does not

mention) saw in second order cybernetics possibilities for new alignments between

human consciousness and the recursive processes that connect us with our environment

(Bateson, 1980). Our point is not that claims by second-order cyberneticians or

researchers in artificial life should be taken at face value, or that we should credit the

much more problematic fantasies of the transhumanists. Rather, we want to underscore

the importance of interventions that emphasize the positive ways in which current

technological trends can open opportunities for progressive actions and empowering

practices.

Although limitations of space prevent us from discussing such opportunities in

detail, we will point to four areas that seem to us especially promising. The first group is

characterized by theoretical emphases on embodiment and its potentialities. Richly

diverse, these approaches seek to use our present lack of ground as an opportunity to re-

envision the relationship between embodied perception, digital media, and artistic and

architectural practices. If the body is one important component of our ground, as

Graafland argues, perhaps “losing our ground” is not such a bad thing if it means sluffing

off outmoded conceptions of the body that are the residue from a liberal tradition

saturated with universalist assumptions about the superiority of the white race, the male

gender, and the rational mind. Once we have moved on from this ground, new

conceptions of embodiment can coalesce around a number of important sites. Research in

brain functioning and imaging technologies, for example, is interpreted in light of art

traditions in Barbara Stafford’s Echo Objects (2007). Gerald Edelman’s work (1989),

which draws in part on imaging technologies, has stimulated a number of responses from

the humanities and arts communities, including those by Joseph Tabbi’s Cognitive

Fictions (2002) and Warren Neidich’s “Resistance is Futile: The Neurobiopolitics of

Consciousness.” (2006). Mark B. N. Hansen in New Philosophy for New Media (2006)

sees in the lack of ground instantiated in digital media positive opportunities for digital

artists to foreground embodied responses as the stabilizing component necessary to make

sense of artistic digital productions. Bernadette Wegenstein in Getting Under the Skin

(2006) goes further by conceptualizing the body itself as a form of media, a move also

made by Eugene Thacker in Biomedia (2004). After recapitulating much of the recent

research on the body, Wegenstein remarks, “We still do not know what the body really

is” (2006, 16). Working from a similar idea of enlightened ignorance, Arakawa and

Madeleine Gins (1979, 2002) treat it as an empowering premise, for it enables them to

start with the primacy of embodiment (not from the body, which is always already a

social, cultural, and technological construction) and devise architectural structures

designed to short-circuit customary perceptions and open onto new sensory experiences

and embodied orientations.

A second kind of positive intervention takes the form of recognizing the

irreducible social and cultural complexities of contexts in which perceptions of

embodiment (and the body) are embedded. The celebratory rhetoric surrounding the

advent of cyberspace and globalization is contextualized by David Harvey’s A Brief

History of Neolibralism (2007) as part of a transnational movement by the upper classes

to recuperate the economic ground lost in the inflationary periods of the 1970’s. Harvey

convincingly shows that neoliberalism, although taking different forms in the United

States, Chile, England and China, nevertheless represents class warfare by other means.

His richly textured analyses provide salutary examples of how underlying patterns can be

discerned without treating reductively the social and cultural complexities in which they

are embedded. On the negative side, we might think of transhumanist rhetoric as it

appears in such prominent spokespeople for the movement as Max Moore. Focused on

the transcendent possibilities for individuals, transhumanist rhetoric almost entirely

ignores the complex issues that would arise from even modest life extension, including

generational conflict, scarcity of resources, and the just allocation of resources when the

world population explodes uncontrollably.

A third kind of positive intervention comes in recognizing new modes of

organization that digital media require and developing theoretical approaches that take

their specificities into account. In Protocol, Galloway (2005) makes an important

contribution in developing what he calls a protocological approach, focusing on the

regimens that allow information to flow through the networks or, conversely, that prevent

the release of high-value informational assets to unauthorized users. In The Exploit,

Galloway and co-author Thacker (2007) work from the theoretical models of Delueze and

the sweeping historical panorama of Hardt and Negri’s Empire to theorize the network as

a ground for political action, showing for example that the networks can be integrated

into centralized bureaucracy as well as into asymmetric warfare. Other important

contributions have been made by Friedrich A. Kittler. Wittily observing that “the

entertainment industry is, in any conceivable sense of the word, an abuse of army

equipment” (1999, 96-97), Kittler traces the technological lineages that resulted in the

contemporary configuration of the military-industrial-entertainment complex. Although

his methodology is anti-humanistic, in that it refuses the primacy of the human as an

adequate explanation for technological development, his approach nevertheless

recognizes the importance of social and cultural presuppositions as they are entwined

with technological issues of data storage, transmission, and manipulation.

Last but hardly least are theoretical approaches, artistic creations, and

architectural practices that emphasize the importance of recursive feedback loops between

embodied practices, social constructions, and the specificities of digital media. The

videographer Paul Ryan, for example, has focused on the tendency of complex systems,

particularly turbulent flow, to produce chaotic patterns that endure over time without ever

repeating themselves exactly (Ryan, 2006). Collaborating with Ryan, Stephanie

Strickland and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo created slippingglimpse, a digital art work of

considerable beauty and theoretical sophistication (Strickland, Jaramillo and Ryan, 2007).

Our own contribution in this area develops the concept of intermediation as a framework

within which digital literature, art, and architecture may be understood (Hayles, 2005;

2008 and Gannon and Hayles, 2007).

Returning again to Graafland’s comment on the loss of ground, we note that

complex systems in general lack a ground in the sense that they defy formalization

through explicit equations, precisely because every factor interacts with, influences, and

is influenced by every other factor. Complex systems do not, however, lack order; rather

they instantiate a particularly complex kind of order capable of demonstrating emergent

properties. Seeking a ground has historically been represented through such monumental

enterprises as the Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica, which sought to

axiomatize mathematics (Russell and Whitehead, 1911). This grand enterprise was driven

by the hope that mathematics could be made logically consistent and formally complete;

it would then, so the reasoning went, provide a solid ground upon which all the other

sciences (and perhaps the social sciences and even the arts) would build. When the

enterprise was proven impossible by Gõdel’s Theorem and related developments such as

the Church-Turing proof, the lack of ground became the catalyst for important artistic

explorations typified by M. C. Escher and, later in the twentieth century, the reading and

writing protocols associated with deconstruction.

The lack of ground need not mean the end of agency, the loss of order, or the utter

transformation of the human into some post-biological version that would be more

machine than biological entity. Rather, viewed as an opportunity for constructive

interventions, the recognition that complex systems are how the natural world mostly

operates opens onto a number of important realizations: that agency is always distributed;

that cognition is a much broader function than consciousness and includes many

embodied capacities outside the central nervous systems; that action always takes place

within embedded and recursive systems that can unpredictably amplify the consequences

of our actions; and that ethical considerations should therefore always be a component of

our considerations. Architecture, deeply entwined with digital media and necessarily

attentive to social and cultural constructions, constitutes an ideal site from which to

explore and intervene in the recursive feedback loops co-constitutive of materiality,

contemporary subjectivity, and digital media.

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{ Narrative and Database
Spatial History and the Limits of Symbiosis }

Ab, the power of metaphors-especially when a metaphor

propagates with viral intensity through a discursive realm.

At issue is Lev Manovich’s characterization of narrative and

database in The Language of New Media (2002) as “natural en

emies” (228), a phrase Ed Folsom rehearses in his discussion

of the Walt Whitman Archive (2007). The metaphor resonates

throughout Folsom’s essay in phrases such as “the attack of

database on narrative” (1574), culminating in his figure of

database’s spread as a viral pandemic that “threatens to dis

place narrative, to infect and deconstruct narrative endlessly,

to make it retreat behind the database or dissolve back into

it” (1577). In this imagined combat between narrative and

database, database plays the role of the Ebola virus, whose

voracious spread narrative is helpless to resist. The inevitable

triumph of database over narrative had already been forecast

in Manovich’s observation that “databases occupy a signifi

cant, if not the largest, territory of the new media landscape”

(2002:228). Indeed , so powerful and pervasive are databases

175

176 Chapter 6

in Manovich’s view that he finds it “surprising” narratives continue to eX I\!

at all in new media (228). In Manovich’s view, the most likely explanation, .,
narrative’s persistence is the tendency in new media to want to tell a St(Jl ,

a regressive tendency he identifies with cinema. Even this, he suggests, is III

the process of being eradicated by experimental filmmakers such as Pet’·,
Greenaway (237-39).

Rather than being natural enemies, narrative and database are more ell

propriately seen as natural symbionts. Symbionts are organisms of differclIl
species that have a mutually beneficial relation. For example, a bird pic k

off bugs that torment a water buffalo, making the beast’s existence mOl .

comfortable; the water buffalo provides the bird with tasty meals. BecaU M

database can construct relational juxtapOSitions but is helpless to interprl’1

or explain them, it needs narrative to make its results meaningful. Narrativ( ‘

for its part, needs database in the computationally intensive culture of t il l

new millennium to enhance its cultural authori ty and test the generality 01

its insights. If narrative often dissolves into database, as Folsom suggest ~,
database catalyzes and indeed demands narrative’s reappearance as soon ,I ‘

meaning and interpretation are required (as the discussion at the conch I

sion of chapter 5 illustrates). The dance (or as I prefer to call it, the complex

ecology) of narrative and database has its origins in the different ontologie~,
purposes, and histories of these two cultural forms. To understand more pre

cisely the interactions betwee n these two cultural forms, let us turn now to
consider their characteristics.

The Different Worldviews of Narrative and Database

As Manovich (2002) observes, database parses the world from the viewpoint

of large-scale data collection and management. For the late twentieth and

early twenty-first centuries, thi s means seeing the world in terms that the

computer can understand. By far the most pervasive form of database is the

relational , which has almost entirel y replaced the older hierarchical, tree,

and network models and continues to hold sway against the newer object

oriented model s. In a relational database, data are par sed into tables consist

ing of rows and columns, where the column heading, or attribute, indicates

some aspect of the table’s topic . Ideally, each table contains data pertaining

to only one “theme” or central data concept. One table, for example, might

contain data about authors, where the attributes might be last name, first

name, birth date, death date, book titles, etc.; another might have publish

ers’ data, also parsed according to attributes; another, books. Relations are

Narrati ve and Database 177

constructed among data elements in the tables according to set-theoretic

ope rations, such as “insert,” “delete,” “select,” and especially “join ,” the com

mand that allows data from different tables to be combined. Common ele

ments allow correlations to be made between tables ; for example, Whitman

would appear in the authors table as an author and in the books table corre

lated with the titles he published; the publishers table would correlate with

the books table through common elements, and through these elements

back to the authors table. Working through these kinds of correlations, set

theoretic operations allow new tables to be constructed from existing ones.

Different interfaces can be designed according to the particular needs of

users. Behind the interface, whatever its form, is a database-management

system that employs set-theoretic notation to query the database and manip

ulate the response through SQL (SQL is commonly expanded as structured

query language) .

The great strength of database, of course, is the ability to order vast

arrays of data and make them available for different kinds of queries. Two

fundamental aspects typically characterize relational databases. One, indi

cated above, is their construction of relations between different attributes

and tables. The other is a well-constructed database’s self-containment, or,

as the technical literature calls it, self-desc ription . A database is said to be

self-describing because its user does not need to go outside the database to

see what it contains. As David Kroenke and David Auer put it in Database

Concepts (2007), the “structure of the database is contained within the da

tabase itself” (13), so that the database’s contents can be determined just by

looking inside it. Its self-describing nature is apparent in SQL

commands.

For the database mentioned above containing information about authors,

books, and publishers, for example, a typical SQL command might take

the generalized form “S ELECT AUTHOR .AuthorName, BOOK. BookTitle,

BOOK.BookDate, BOOK. Publisher, PUBLISHER. Location ,” where the table

names are given in all capitals (as are SQL commands) and the data record s

are categorized according to the attributes, with a period separating table

name from attribute . The database’s self-description is crucial to being able

to query it with set-theoretic operations, which require a formally closed

logical sys tem upon which to operate. This is also why databases fit so we ll

with computers. Like databases, computers work according to the opera

tions of formal logiC as defined by the logiC gates that underlie all executable

commands.

The self-describing nature of database provides a strong contrast with

narrati ve, which always contains more than indicated by a table of contents

178 Chapter 6

or a list of chapter con tents . Databases can, of course, also extend out\\ ”

when they are linked and queried as a network-for example, in data 11 11′

ing and text mining techniques-but they do not lose the formal proP(‘ 11 j.

of closure that make them self-describing artifacts. Nevertheless, the 11’11

nologies of linking databases have proven to be remarkably powerful. oil

the relations revealed by set-theoretic operations on networks of Iill ~

databases can have stunning implications. For exa mple, data- and I n l

mining techniques allowed epidemiologist re searchers Don Swansoll .11 ‘

N. R. Smalheiser (1994, 1997) to hypothesize causes for rare diseases II.
hitherto had re sisted analysis because they occurred infrequently at wid d

separated locales. Even in this case, however, the meaning of the relaliOlI

posited by the database remains outside the realm of data techniques. WI L’

it means that Whitman, say, used a certain word 298 times in Leaves ofG rn
while using another wo rd only 3 times requires interpretation-and illto l

pretation , almost inevitably, invokes narrative to achieve dramatic imp,II I

and significance. Many data analysts and statisticians are keenly awar(‘ 1.1

this symbiosis between narrative and data. John W. Tukey, in his classic te xl
book Exploratory Data Analysis (1997), for example, explains that the data 01 11
alyst “has to learn … how to expose himself to what his data are willing-ol

even anxious-to tell him” (21), following up the lesson by later asking t ill

student/reader “what story did each [dataset] tell ” (101).

Database and narrative, their interdependence notwithstanding, rem,li ll

different species, like bird and water buffalo. Databases must parse infol

mation according to the logical categories that order and list the differe lll
data elements. Indeterminate data-data that are not known or otherwi~(

elude the boundaries of the preestablished categories-must either be reI’

resented through a null value or not be repre se nted at all. Even though SOIlIl’

relational databases allow for the entry of null values, such values work ill

set-theoretic operations as a contaminant, since any operation containing .1

null value wi ll give a null value as its result, as multiplying a number by zero

yields zero. Null values can thus quickly sp read through a database , render

ing everything they touch indeterminate. Moreover, database operations say

nothing about how data are to be collected or whi ch data should qualify for

collection, nor does it indicate how the data should be parsed and catego

rized. Constructing a database always involves assumptions about how to

set up the relevant categories, which in turn may have ideological implica

tions, as Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have observed (2000) .

In addition, such decisions greatly influence the viability, usefulness, and

operational integrity of databases. Thomas Connolly and Carolyn Begg in

179Narrative and Database

/)atabase Systems (2002) estimate that for corporate database software de

velopment projects, 80 to 90 percent do not meet their performance goals,

80 percent are delivered late and over budget, and 40 percent fail or are

.d,andoned (270). Anticipating such problems, database textbooks routinely

ldvise students to keep the actual design of the database a closely guarded

~ l: cret, confining discussions with the paying client to what the interface

·; hould look like and how it should work. In addition to not “confusing” the

I lient, such a strategy obscures suboptimal performance.
The indeterminacy that databases find difficult to tolerate marks another

way in which narrati ve differs from database. Narratives gesture toward the

Inexplicable, the un speakable, the ineffable, whereas databases rely on enu

Ineration, requiring explicit articulation of attributes and data values. I While

I he concatenation of relations might be suggestive, as the epidemiology ex

‘ llnple illustrates , databases in themselves can only speak that which can

explicitly be spoken. Narratives, by co ntrast, invite in the unknown, taking

lIS to the brink signified by Henry James’s figure in the carpet, Kurtz’s “The

horror, the horror;’ Gatsby’s green light at pier’s end, Kerouac’s beatitude,

Pynchon’s crying of Lot 49. Alan Liu, discuss ing the possibilities for this kind

of gesture in a postindustrial information-intensive era, connects it with “the

ethos of the unknown” and finds it expressed in selected artworks as a “data

pour,” an overflowing uncontainable excess that he links with transcendence

(2008b:81).
Whereas database reflects the computer’s ontology and operates with op

timum effiCiency in set-theoretic operations based on formal logic, narrative

is an ancient linguistic technology almost as old as the human species. As

such, narrative modes are deeply influenced by the evolutionary needs of hu

mans negotiating unpredi ctable three-dimensional environments populated

by dive rse autonomous agents. As Mark Turner has argued in The Literary

Mind: Th e Origins of Thought and Language (1998) , stories are central in the
development of human cognition. Whereas database allows large amounts

of information to be sorted, cataloged, and queried, narrative models how

minds think and how the world works, projects in which temporality and

inference play rich and complex roles . Extending Paul Ricoeur’s (1990) work

on temporality and Gerard Genette’s (1983) on narrative modalities , Mieke

Bal (1998) analyzes narrative as requiring, at a minimum, an actor and nar

rator and consisting of three distinct leve ls , text, story, and fabula, each with

its own chronology (6). To this we can add Brian Richardson’s emphasis in

Unlikely Stories: Causality and the Nature of Modern Narrative (1997) on cau

sality and inference in narrative. 2

181 180 Chapter 6

Why should narrative emphasize these aspects rather than others? B Olli

to the linear sequentiality of language, narrative complicates it through I,·”

poral enfoldings of story (or, as Genette prefers to call it, discourse) ,II

fabula , reflecting the complexities of acting when knowledge is incom plr”

and the true situation may be revealed in an order different from thl’ 01

logical reconstruction requires. Narrator ·and actor inscribe the situatioll ” I

subject constantly negotiating with agents who have their own agendas ,110

desires, while causality and inference represent the reasoning required I

suture different temporal trajectories, motives, and actions into an expl <1I1

tory frame. These structures imply that the primary purpose of narrati vi’ I

to search for meaning, making narrative an essential technology for hum ,1I1

who can arguably be defined as meaning-seeking animals.

Bound to the linear order of language through syntax, narrative is a t l’lII

poral technology, as the complex syncopations betwee n story and fab ul.

demonstrate. The order in which events are narrated is crucial, and tern!”

ral considerations are centrally important in narratology, as Ricoeur’s Wil l

(1990), among others, illustrates. Data sets and databases , by contrast, leu r!
themselves readily to spatial displays, from the two-dimensional tables typ,
cal of relational databases to the more complex n-dimensional arrays alld

spatial forms that statisticians and data analysts use to understand the S ill
ries that data tell.

Manovich touches on this contrast when he argues that for narrative, ti ll

syntagmatic order of linear unfolding is actually present on the page, wIll I!

the paradigmatic possibilities of alternative word choices are only virtuall ~

present. For databases , the reverse is true: the paradigmatic possibilities ;’\1,

actually present in the columns and rows, while the syntagmatic progress (11
choices concatenated into linear sequences by SQL commands is only virt.u

ally present (Manovich 2002 :228) This influential formulation , despite il

popularity, is seriously flawed, as Allen Bye Riddell points out (pers. COIJI

munication April 7, 2008). Recall that in semiotics, the alternative choic~’ ~
of the paradigm interact with the inscribed word precisely because they an’

absent from the page, although active in the reader’s imagination as a set nl

related terms . Contrary to Manovich’s claim, databases are not paradigmatit

in this sense. In a relational database configured as columns and rows, tht.:

data values of a row constitute the attributes of a given record, while tht’

columns represent the kinds of attribute itemized for many different records.

In neither the rows nor columns does a logic of substitution obtain; the terms

are not synonyms or sets of alternative terms but different data values.

Narrati ve and Database

These objections notwithstanding, Manovich’s formulation contains a

!rnel of truth. Search queries, as we have seen, allow different kinds of

,lttributes and data values to be concatenated . The concatenated values, al

tl lough not syntagmatic in the usual sense, can be seen as a (virtual) tempo

f ,II process in which it is not syntax but the SQL command that determines

Ibe concatenation’s order. Thus, although Manovich’s formulation is not

l~c hnically correct, it captures the overall sense that the temporal ordering

n ucial for narrative is only Virtually present in the database, whereas spatial

lisplay is explicit. I would add to this the observation that time and space,

I he qualiti es Kant identified as intrinsic to human sensory-cognitive facul

t ies, inevitably coexist. While one may momentarily be dominant in a given

~ i luation, the other is always implicit, the natural symbiont whose existence

IS inextricably entwined with its partner. It should be no surprise, then, that

Ila rrative and database align themselve s with these partners, or that they too

:xist in symbiosis with one another.

Given this entwinement, is it plausible to imagine, as Manovich and

Folsom imply at various points, that database will replace narrative to the

;xtent that narrative fades from the scene? A wealth of evidence points in

I he other direction: narrative is essential to the human Iifeworld. Jerome

J) runer, in his book significantly entitled Acts of Meaning : Four Lectures on

Mind and Culture (1992), cites studies indicating that mothers tell their chil
dren some form of narrative several times each hour to guide their actions

,md explain how the world works (81-84). We take narrative in with moth
l!r’s milk and practice it many times every day of our lives-and not only

in high culture forms such as print novels . Newspapers, gossip, math story

problems, television dramas, radio talk shows, and a host of other communi

cations are permeated by narrative. Wherever one looks, narratives surface,

as ubiquitous in everyday culture as dust mites.

What has changed in the informative-intensive milieu of the twenty-first

century is the position narrative occupies in the culture. Whereas in the clas

sical Greek and Roman era narrative was accepted as an adequate explanation

for large-scale events-the creation of the world, the dynamics of wind and

fire , earth and water-global explanations are now typically rooted in data

analysis. If we want to understand the effects of global warming or whether
the economy is headed for a recovery, we likely would not be content with

anecdotes about buttercups appearing earlier than usual in the backyard or

Aunt Agnes’s son finally finding a job. Data, along with the databases that

collect, parse, and store them and the database-management systems that

182 Chapter 6

concatenate and query them are essential for understanding large-scal e ph,

nomena. At the global level , databases are essential. Even there, howl”’,

narrative enters in the interpretation of the relations revealed by datah.,

queries. When Ben Bernanke testifies before Congress, he typically does . It

recount data alone. Rather, he tells a story, and it is the story, rather t h.II
the data by themselves, that propagates through the news media, bec;)l1 ·

it encapsulates in easily comprehensible form the meaning exposed by d.ll

collection and analysis.

In contrast to global dynamics, narrative at the local leve l remains pen ,I

sive, albeit more and more infused by data . In the face of the overwhelmil l

quantities of data that database-management systems now put at our fingl”l

tips, no one narrative is likely to establish dominance as the explanation, tn,
the interpretive possibilities proliferate as databases increase. In this respc( I

the advent of the Internet, espeCially the World Wide Web, has been decisi vl ·

N ever before in the history of the human species has so much information bel “I

so easily available to so many. The constant expansion of new data aCCOUlIl

for an important advantage that relational databases have over narratives, fOl
new data elements can be added to existing databases without disrupting th <.:ll

order. Unlike older computer database models in which memory pointci

were attached directly to data elements, relational databases allow the ordl’l

of the rows and columns to vary without affecting the system’s ability to local.·

the proper elements in memory. This flexibility allows databases to expand

without limitation (subject, of course, to the amount of memory storage al

located to the database). Narrative in thi s respect operates quite differently.

Sensitively dependent on the order in which information is revealed, narra

tive cannot in general accommodate the addition of new elements without.

in effect, telling a different story. Databases tend toward inclusivity, narratives

toward selectivity. Harry Mathews explores this property of narrative in Th(‘

Journalist: A Novel (1994), where the unnamed protagonist, intent on making a
list of everything that happens in his life, thinks of more and more items, with

the predictable result that the list quickly tends toward chaos as the interpola

tions proliferate. The story of this character’s life cannot stabilize, because the

information that co nstitutes it continues to grow exponentially, until both list

and subject collapse.

That novels like Th e Journalist should be written in the late twentieth cen

tury speaks to the challenges that database pose s to narrative in the age of

information. No doubt phenomena like this explain why Manovich would

characterize database and narrative as “natural enemies” and why thought

ful scholars would propagate the metaphor. Nevertheless, the same dynamic

183Narrative and Database

li so explains why the expansion of database is a powerful force constantly

pawning new narratives. The flip side of narrative’s inability to tell the

lory is the proliferation of narratives as they transform to accommodate

pe w data and mutate to probe what lie s beyond the exponentially expanding

w fosphere. No longer Singular, narratives remain the necessary others to

rl dla base’s ontology, the perspectives that inves t the formal logic of database

II pe rations with human meanings and gesture toward the unknown hover

Ing beyond the brink of what can be classified and enumerated.

Spatial History: A Field in Transition

Among the disciplines that routinely rely on narrative is qualitative history.

Traditionally seen as centering on “change through time,” history has re

cently been going through a “spatial turn,” in which databases, GIS, and GPS

t I.!chnologies have provided an array of tools for rethinking and re-representing

I he problematics of history in spatial terms. Accordingly, historian s have

moved into alliance with geographers in new ways. This movement has its

own tensions, howeve r, for geographers often rely on discursive methods of

{; xplanation, whereas historians are turning more and more to databases .

The tension can be seen in the work of Doreen Massey (2005) compared

to such database history projects as those of the Stanford Spatial History

r’roject. Massey, an important contemporary geographer, has a dream: to

replace the idea of space as an inert container w ith a conceptualization of it

:\s an emergent property constructed through interrelations and containing

diverse simultaneous trajectories. In general, she advocates a view of space

as “lively” rather than “dead.” Above all, she does not wa nt space conceptual

ized as a pre-give n Cartesian manifold that extends in every direction, infi

nitely subdividable and homogeneous through multiple scale values. Yet this

seems to be preCisely w hat Google Earth, GIS, and GPS digital technologies

offer, with the illusion of present-tense rendering, zoom functions through

multiple scale levels , and seamless transitions between map, satellite, and

street views. Given the power, pervasiveness, and allure of such visualiza

tions, can Massey’s dream gain traction in contemporary representations?

More generally, does the “spatial turn” in digital history projects imply that

the traditional focus on time for historians has now been transformed into

spatializations that take the Cartesian grid as the basis for hi storical repre

se ntations? Answering these questions requires a deeper understanding of

what Massey’s dream implies, along with its roots in prior wo rk by geogra

phers and an analysis of how GIS and GPS technologies are actually being

Th e Database

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The Database Logic

After the novel, and subsequendy cinema, privileged narrative as the key
tJ f\,., …. lof “j’, II (.

form of cui rural expression of the modern age, the compurer age introduces ‘I’ .
,{‘r.”,..{~ its correlate-the database. Many new media objeers do not tell stories; they

do not have a beginning or end; in faer, they do nor have any development,

thematically, formally, or otherwise that would organize their elements into

a sequence. Instead , they are colleerions of individual items, with evety item

possessing the same significance as any other,
Why does new media favor the database form over others) Can we explain

its popularity by analy zing the specificity of the digital medium and of com

purer programming ) What is the relationship between the database and an

other form that has ttaditionally dominated human culture-narrative)

These are the questions I will address in this seerion,

Before proceeding , I need to comment on my use of the word databas e, In

compurer science, databclse is defined as a s(fuctured collection of data, The

data stored in a database is organized for fast search and retrieval by a com

purer and therefore, it is anything bur a simple colleerion of items, Different

types of databases-hierarchical, network , relational, and object-oriemed

use different models to organize data. For instance , the records in hietarchi

cal databases are organized in a (feel ike structure . Objeer-oriented databases

store complex data sttuctures, called “objectS,” which are organized into hi

erarchical classes that may inherit properties ftom classes higher in the chain, 5

5, “Database ,” Encydopcedia BriJarmica Online, ht (p:llwww.eb.com:180/cg i-binlg)DocF=microl

160/2 3, hrmL

Chapter 5

New media objects mayor may not employ these highly structured database

models; however, ftom the point of view of the user’s experience, a large pro

porrion of them are databases in a more basic sense, They appear as collections

of items on whi ch the user can perform various operations-view, navigate,

search. The user ‘s experience of such compurerized collections is, therefore,

quite distinct from reading a narrative or watching a film or navigating an ar

chitectural site, Similarly, a literary or cinematic narrative, an architectural

plan, and a database each present a different model of what a world is like, It

is thi s sense of database as a cultural form of its own that I want to address

here, Following art historian Ervin Panofsky’s analysis of linear perspecrive as

a “symbolic form” of the modern age , we may even call database a new sym

bolic form of the compurer age (or, as philosopher Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard

called it in his famous 1979 book The Postmodern Condition, “compurerized so

ciety”),6 a new way to S(fucture our experience of ourselves and of the world,

Indeed, if after the death of God (Nietzche), the end of grand Narratives of

Enlightenment (Lyotard), and the arrival of the Web (Tim Berners-Lee), the

world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images , texts,

and other dara records, it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model

it as a database, But it is also appropriate that we would want to develop a po

etics , aesthetics, and ethics of this database,

Let us begin by documenting the dominance of the database form in new

media. The most obvious examples are popular multimedia encyclopedias,

collections by definition , as well as orher commercial CD-ROM (or DVD),

that feature collections of recipes , quotations, photographs, and so on , 7 The

identity of a CD-ROM as a storage media is projecred OntO another plane,

thereby becoming a cultural form in its own right. Multimedia works that

have “cultural ” content appear to particularly favor the database form, Con

sider, for instance, the “virtual museums” gente-CD-ROMs that take the

user on a tour thtough a museum collection. A museum becomes a database

of images representing its holdings, which can be accessed in different

6 , Jean-Fra n~o is Lyorard , T be POJtmodem Co”dition: A Report on Knowledge. tran s, G eoff Ben

ningron a nd Brian Mas sumi (Minneapoli s: Universiry of Minnesota Press, 1984), 3 ,

7, As ea rly as 1985, Grol ie r, Inc. issu ed a text-only Academic Americtm Ellcyclopedia on CD-ROM.

The firsr multimedi a encyclopedia was Compton ,’ M7IltilHedia Encyclopedia, published in 1989.

Th e Forms

ways-chronologically, by country, or by aniSL Alchough such CD-ROMs

often simulate the rraditional museum experience of moving from room ro

room in a continuous rrajecrory, this narrati ve method of access does not have

any special stams in comparison ro other access methods offered by CD

ROMs. Thus narrative becomes just one method of accessing data among

many. Anorher example of a database form is a multimedia genre that does

nor have an equivalent in rraditional media-CD-ROMs devoted ro a single

cultural figure such as a famous architecr, film direcror, or writer. Instead of

a narrative biography, we are presented wi th a database of images, sound

recordings , video clips, and/or texts that can be navigated in a variety of

ways.

CD-ROMs and other digital srorage media proved ro be panicularly re

ceptive ro rraditional genres that already had a database-like strucrure, such

as the phoro album; they also inspired new database genres, like the database

biography. Where the darabase form really flourished, however, is the Inrer

neL As defined by original HTML, a Web page is a sequential list of sepa

rate elements-text blocks, images, digirai video clips, and links ro orher

pages. It is always possible ro add a new element ro the list-all you have ro

do is ro open a file and add a new line. As a result, most Web pages are col

lecrions of separate elements-texts, images, links ro other pages, or sites.

A home page is a collection of personal phorographs. A site of a major search

engine is a collection of numerous links ro other sites (along with a search

funcrion, of course). A site of a \’Qeb-based TV or radio station offers a col

lecrion of video or aud io programs along with th e option ro listen ro the cur

rent broadcast, bur this current program is JUSt one choice among many

orher programs srored on the site. Thus the traditional broadcasting experi

ence, which consists solely of a real-time rransmission , becomes JUSt one el

ement in a collection of options. Similar co the CD-ROM medium, the Web

offered fertile ground co already existing database genres (for instance , bib

liography) and also inspired the creation of new ones such as sites devoted to

a person or a phenomenon (Madonna, the Civil War, new media theory, etc.)

that, even if they contain original material, inevitably center around a list of

links co other Web pages on the same person or phenomenon.

The open namre of the Web as a medium (Web pages are compurer files

that can always be edited) means that Web sites never have co be complete;

and they rarely are. They always grow. New links are continually added co

what is already there . It is as easy ro add new elements ro the end of a list as

Chapter 5

it is ro insert them anywhere in iL All this further contribures ro the anti

narrative logic of the Web. If new elements are being added over time, the

result is a collection , not a srory. Indeed , how can one keep a coherent narra

tive or any other developmenr trajecrory through the material if it keeps

changing?

Commercial producers have experimenred with ways ro explore the data

base form inherenr ro new media, with offerings ranging from multimedia

encyclopedias ro collections of software and collections of pornographic im

ages. In contrast, many artists working with new media at first uncritically

accepted the database form as a given. Thus they became blind vicrims of

database logic. Numerous artists ‘ Web sites are collections of multimedia el

emenrs documenring their works in other media. In the case of many early

anists’ CD-ROMs as well, the tendency was ro fill all the avai lable srorage

space with different material-the main work, documenration, related

texts, previous works, and so on.

As the 1990s progressed, artis ts increasingly began co approach the data

base more critically.8 A few examples of projects investigating database poli

tics and possible aesthetics are Chris Marker’s “IMMEMORY,” Olga Lialina’s

“Anna Karenina Goes ro Paradise,”9 Stephen Mamber ‘s “Digital Hitchcock,”

and Fabian Wagmister’s ” … twO, three, many Guevaras .” The artist who has

explored the possibilities of a database most systematically is Geotge Legrady.

In a series of inreracrive multimedia works (“The Anecdoted Archive,” 1994;

“[the clearing},” 1994; “Slippey Traces,” 1996; “Tracing,” 1998) he used

different types of databases ro create “an information st ructure where

srorieslthings are organized according ro multiple thematic connecrions.” 10

Data and Algorithm

Of course, not all new media objects are explicitly databases. Computer

games, for insrance, are experienced by their players as narratives. In a game,

8. See Al and Sociely 13.3, a special issue on database aestheti CS, ed. Victoria Vesna (http://arrs.

ucsb.edu/-vesna/ACSociety/); SlJ?ITCH 5, no. 3, “The Database Issue” (http://switch.sjsu.

edu/).

9. http: //www. teleporracia .org/anna.

10. Geotge Legtady, personal commun ication, 16 September 1998.

The Forms

http://www

http://switch.sjsu

http://arrs

the playet is given a we ll-defined task-winning the match, being first in a

race , reaching the last level , or attaining the highest score. It is this task that

makes the playet experi ence the game as a narrative. Everything that hap

pens co her in a game, all the characters and objects she encounters, either

take her closer co achieving the goal or further away from it. Thus, in con

trast co a CD-ROM and Web database , which always appear arbitrary be

cause the user knows additional material could have been added without

modifying the logic, in a game, from the user ‘s point of view, all the elements

are motivated (i.e., th eir presence is justified). Ii

Often the narrative she ll of a game (“You are t he specially trained com

mando who has JUSt landed on a luna r base; your task is co make your way co

the headquarters occupied by the mutant base personnel …”) masks a

simple algorit hm well-familiar co the player-kill all the enemies on the

current level , while co ll eCting all the treasures it contains; go to the next

level and so on until you reach the last level. Other games have different al

go rithms. Here is the algorithm of the legendary Tett’is: When a new block

appeats, rotate it in such a way so that it will complete the cop layer of blocks

on the bottom of the screen, thus making this layer disappear. The similar

ity between the actions expeCted of the player and compmet algorithms is

roo uncanny to be dismissed. While computer games do not follow a data

base logic, they appear ro be ruled by another logic-that of the algorithm.

They demand that a player execute an algorithm in order co win.

An algorithm is the key co the game experience in a different sense as

well. As the player proceeds through the game, she gradually discovers the

rules that operate in the universe construCted by this game. She learns its

hidden logic – in short, its algorithm. Therefore , in games in which the

game play departs from following an algorithm, the player is still engaged

w ith an algorithm albe it in anOther way: She is discovering the algorithm of

11. Bordwell and Thompson define motivation in cinema in the following way: “Because

films are human cons rru cts, we ca n expect that anyone element in a film will have some jus

tification for being th ere. Thi s justification is the motivation for that e lement .” Here are some

examples of motivation: “When Tom jumps from the balloon to chase a ca t , we motivat e his

action by appealing to notions of how dogs are likely ro act when cats are a round ” ; “The move

ment of a cbaracter actoss a room may motivate the movin g of the ca mera to follow the action

and keep the chatacter within a frame.” Bordwell and Thompson, Film Arl, 5th ed., 80.

Chapter 5

the game itself. I mean this both metaphorically and literally: For instance,

in a first-person shooter such as Quake the player may eventually notice that,

under such and such conditions, the enemies will appea r from the left; that

is , she will literall y reconstruct a part of the algorithm responsible for the

game play. Or, in a different fotmulation of the legendary amhot of Sim

games, Will Wright, “p laying the game is a continuous loop between the

user (viewing the outcomes and inputting decisions) and the computer (ca l

culating outcomes and displaying them back ro the use r). The user is trying

ro build a mental model of the co mputer model.”J 2

Thi s is another example of the general principle of rranscod ing discussed

in the first chapter-the projeCtion of the ontology of a comp uter OntO cul

tUre itself. If in physics the wo rld is made of acoms and in genetics it is made
of genes, computer programming encapsulates the world according ro its

own logic. The world is reduced ro tWO kinds of software objeCts that are

complementary ro each Other-data sttUCtures and algorithms. Any process

Ot task is reduced ro an algorithm, a final sequence of simple operations that

a compmer can execute ro accomplish a given task. And any object in the

world-be it the population of a city, or the weather over the comse of a cen

tUry, Ot a chair, or a human brain-is modeled as a data structure, that is,

data organized in a particular way for efficient search and rerrieval. ‘ 3 Ex

amples of data structUres are arrays, linked lists, and g raphs . Algorithms and

data struCtures have a symbiOtic relationship. The mote complex the data

scructure of a computer program, the simpler the algori chm needs ro be, and

vice versa. Together, data scructUtes and algorithms are rwo halves of the

ontology of the world according co a compmer.

The compucerization of cultUre involves the projection of these tWO fun

damental pares of compute r software-and of the compmer ‘s unique ontol

ogy-OntO che culcural sphere. If CD-ROMs and Web databases are cultural

manifestations of one half of chis onrology-data s((uctUres-then com

puter games are manifestarions of the second half-algo tithm s. Games

(sPO[(s, chess, cards, etc.) are one cultUral form that requi re algorithm-like

12. McGowan and McCullaugh, E7lIertainlllcn/ ill the Cyber Zone, 71.

13. This is true for a procedural programming paradigm . In an objecr-oriented programming

paradigm, represented by such compute r languages as Java and C++, algori thm s and data

Structures are m odeled together as objects.

The Forms

behavior from players; consequencly, many craditional games were quickly

simulated on computers. In patallel, new genres of computer games such as

the first-perso n shooter came into existence . Thus , as was the case with data

base genres, computer games both mimic already existing games and create

new game genres.

It may appeat at first sight that data is passive and algorithms active

another example of the passive-active binary categories so loved by human

cultures. A progtam reads in data, execures an algorithm, and writes out new

data. We may recall that before “computer science” and “software engineet

ing” became established names in the compurer field, this was called “data

processing”-a name which remained in use for the few decades during

which computers were mainly associated with performing calculations over

data. However, the passive/active distinction is not quite accurate because

data does not JUSt exist-it has ro be generated. Data creators have ro col

lect data and organize it, or create it from scratch. Texts need to written, pho

rographs need to be taken, video and audio matetial need ro be recorded. Or

they need ro be digitized from already existing media. In the 1990s, when

the new role of the computer as a Universal Media Machine became appar

ent, already computerized societies went into a digitizing ctaze. All existing

books and videotapes , phorographs, and audio recordings starred ro be fed

into computers at an ever-increasing rate. Steven Spielberg created the Shoah

Foundation, which videotaped and then digitized numerous interviews with

Holocaust survivors; it would take one person forry yeats to watch all the

recorded material. The edirors of the journal Mediamatic, who devoted a

whole issue to the topic of “the srorage mania” (Summer 1994) wrote: “A

growing number of organizations are embarking on ambitious projects.

Everything is being collected: culture, asteroids, DNA patterns , credit

records , telephone conversations; it doesn’t matter.”14 In 1996, the financial

company T. Rowe Price srored eight hundred gigabytes of data; by the fall

of 1999 thi s number rose ro ten terabytes. IS

Once digitized , the data has ro be cleaned up , otganized, and indexed.

The computer age brought with it a new cultural algorithm: reality~

14. M edialllatic 8, no . 1 (Summer 1994), IS60.

15. Bob Laird, “Informa rion Age Losing Memory,” USA Today, 25 Oerober 1999.

Chapter 5

media~data~database. The rise of the Web, this gigantic and always

changing data corpus, gave millions of people a new hobby or profession-data

indexing. There is hardly a Web site that does not feature at least a dozen

links ro other sites; thetefore , every site is a type of database. And, with the

rise of Internet commerce, most large-scale commercial sites have become

real databases, or rather front-ends ro company databases. For instance, in

the fa ll of 1998, Amazon.com , an online booksrore, had three million books

in its database ; and the maker of the leading commercial database Orade has

offered Orade 8i, fully integrated with the Internet and featuring unlimited

darabase size, natural-language queties, and SUppOf( for all multimedia data

types. 16 Jorge Luis Borges’s story about a map equal in size ro the terrirory it

represe nts is rewritten as a srory abour indexes and the data they index. But

now the map has become larger than the territory. Sometimes, much larger.

Porno Web sites exposed the logic of the Web at its extreme by constancly

reusing rhe same photographs from other porno Web sites. Only rare sites

featured the original content. On any given date, the same few dozen images

would appear on thousands of sites. Thus, the same data would give rise to

more indexes than the numbet of data elements themselves.

Database and Narrative

As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it

refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect tra

jectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and nar

rative are natural enemies. Competing for the same terrirory of human

culture, each claims an exclusive right ro make meaning our of the world.

In contrast to most games, most narratives do not require algorithm-like

behaviOt from theit readers. However, narratives and games are similar in

that the uset must uncover their underlying logic while proceeding through

them-their algorithm. JUSt like the game player, the reader of a novel gtad

ually reconstructs the algorithm (here I use the term metaphorically) that

the writer used to create the settings, the charactets , and the eVents. From

this perspective, I can rewrite my earlier equations between the two parts of

16. h rrp:! Iwww.amazon. eom /exec/obidos/s ubsr/misclcompany-info. hrm 11, hnp:1 Iwww.oracle.

com /darabase/oracleSi/.

The For ms

http:Amazon.com

the compurer’s ontology and its corresponding cui rural forms. Data suuc

rutes and algorithms drive different forms of compurer culrure. CD-ROMs,

Web sites, and other new media objects organized as databases correspond to

the data Strucrure, whereas narratives , including compurer games, corre

spond to algorithm.

In compurer programming, data suucrures and algorithms need each

other; they are equally important for a ptOgram ro work. What happens in

the culrural sphete) Do databases and narratives have the same starus in

compurer culrure)

Some media objeers explicitly follow a database log ic in their strucrure

whereas others do not; bur under the surface, practically all of them are data

bases. In gene ral, crea ting a work in new media can be undersrood as the con

struction of an interface to a database. In the simplest case, the interface

simply provides access to the underlying database. For instance, an image

database can be represented as a page of miniarure images; clicking on a

miniarure will retrieve the corresponding recotd. If a database is tOO large to

display all of its records at once, a search engine can be provided to allow the

user to search for particular records. Bur the interface can also uanslate the

underlying database into a very different user expe rience. The user may be

navigating a virtual three-dimensional city composed from leners , as in Jef

frey Shaw’s interactive installation “Legible City.” 17 Or she may be travers

ing a black-and-white image of a naked body, activating pieces of text,

audio, and video embedded in its skin (Harwood’s CD-ROM “Rehearsal of

Memory.”)I S Or she may be playing with virrual animals that come closer or

run away depending upon her movements (Scon Fisher et aI., VR installa

tion “Menagerie.”)19 Although each of these works engages the user in a set

of behaviors and cognitive activities that are quite distiner ftOm going

through the records of a database, all of them are databases. “Legible City ”

is a database of three-dimensional letters that make up a city. “Rehearsal of

Memory” is a database of texts and audio and video clips that are accessed

through the interface of a body. And “Menagerie” is a database of virrual an

imals, including their shapes, movements, and behaviors.

1 7. http://attnetweb.eom/guggenheim/mediaseape/shaw.html.

18 . Harwood, Rebecmal of Memor)’. CD-ROM (London : Anee and Bookworks, 1996.)

19. hccp:llwww.telepresenee.eom/MENAGERIE.

Chapter 5

The database becomes the center of the creative process in the com purer

age . HistOrically, the artist made a unique work within a particular medium.

Therefore the interface and the work were the same; in other words, the level

of an interface did not exist. With new media, the content of the work and

the interface are separated. It is therefore possible ro create different inter

faces to the same material. These interfaces may present differem versions of

the same work, as in David Blair’s Wax\Veb. 20 Or they may be radically dif

ferent from each other, as in Olga Lialina’s Last Real Net Art Museum. 21 This

is one of the ways in which the principle of variability of new media mani

fests itself. Bur now we can give this principle a new formulation. The new

media object cOllJists 0/ one or more inter/aces to ct database o/multimedia material If
only one interface is construered, the result will be similar to a traditional art

objeer, bur this is an exception rather than the norm.

This formulation places the opposition between database and narrative in

a new light, thus redefining our concept of narrative . The ” user” of a narra

tive is traversing a database, following links between its records as estab

lished by the database ‘s crearor. An interaerive narrative (w hich can be also

called a hypernarrative in an analogy with hypertext ) can then be understOod

as the sum of multiple trajeerories through a database. A traditional linear

narrative is one among many other possible trajeerories, that is, a particular

choice made within a hypernarrative. JUSt as a traditional culrural objeCt can

now be seen as a particular case of a new media objeCt (i.e., a new media ob

jeer that has only one imerface), traditional linear narrative can be seen as a

particular case of hypernarrative.

This ” technical ,” or ” material,” change in the definition of narrative

does not mean tha t an arbitrary sequence of database records is a narrative.

To qualify as a narrative, a cultural objeer has to satisfy a number of crite

ria , which literary theori st Mieke Bal defines as follows: It should contain

both an acror and a narraror; it also should contain three distinct levels con

sisting of the text, the stOry, and the fabula; and its “co ments ” should be “a

series of connected evems caused or experienced by acrors.” 22 Obviously, not

20. hccp:lljefferson. village. vi rgin ia .eclu/wax/.

2 1. hccp:llm yboyfriencl ea lll ebaekfromth.ewar.ru.

22. Mieke Bal, Narratolog),: I”trod”ction to tbe Theory of N a” ‘cllio’e (Toromo: Uni ve rsiry of

Toronco Press , 1985),8.

The Forms

http:hccp:llmyboyfrienclealllebaekfromth.ewar.ru

http:Museum.21

http://attnetweb.eom/guggenheim/mediaseape/shaw.html

a.ll culrural objects are narratives. However, in the world of new media, the

word narrative is often used as an all-inclusive term, to cover up the fact

that we have not yet developed a language ro describe these new strange

objects. It is usually paired with another overused word-interactive. Thus

a number of database records linked together so that more than one ua

jectory is possible is assumed ro constitute an “interactive narrative.” But

metely ro create these trajecrories is of course not sufficient; the author also

has to conuol the semantics of the elements and the logic of their connec

tion so that the resulting object will meet the ctitetia of narrative as Out

lined above. Another erroneous assumption frequently made is that, by

creating her own path (i.e., choosing the records from a database in a par

ticular order), the user constructs het own unique narrative. However, if

the user simply accesses different elemen tS, one after anothet, in a usually

random order, thete is no reason ro assume that these elements will form a

narrative at all. Indeed, why should an atbitrary sequence of database

records, constructed by the user, result in “a seties of connected events

caused or experienced by acrors ” )

In summary, database and narrative do not have the same status in com

purer culture. In the database/narrative pair, database is the unmatked

term. 23 Regardless of whether new media objects present themselves as lin

ear narratives, interactive narratives, databases, Ot something else, under

neath, on the level of material organization, they are all databases. In new

media, the database suppOrtS a variety of cultural fotms that range from di

rect translation (i.e., a database stays a database) ro a form whose logic is the

opposite of the logic of the material form itself-narrative. More precisely,

a database can suppOtt narrative, but there is nothing in the logic of the

medium itself that would foster its generation. It is not surptising, then,

that databases occupy a significant, if not the latgest, territory of the new

media landscape. What is mote surprising is why the othet end of the spec

uum-narratives-still exist in new media.

2 3. The rh eory of markedness was firsr developed by linguisrs of rh e Prague School in relarion

co phonology, bur subsequenrl y applied co all levels oflinguisric analysis. For exampl e , “roos

rer” is a marked rerm and “c hicken ” an unmarked rerm. Wherea s “roosrer” is used only in re

larion ro males, “chi cken” is applicable co bo rh males and females.

Chapter 5

Paradigm and Synragm

The dynamics that exist between database and narrative are not unique in

new media. The telation between the suuctute of a digital image and the

languages of contemporary visual culture is characterized by the same dy

namics. As defined by all computer software, a digital image consists of a

number of separate layets, each layer containing particular visual elements.

Throughout the production process, artists and designets manipulate each

layer separately; they also delete layers and add new ones. Keeping each ele

ment as a sepatate layer allows the content and the composition of an image

ro be changed at any point-deleting a background, substituting one per

son fot another, moving tWO people closer rogether, blurring an object, and

so on. What would a typical image look like if the layers were merged to

gether) The elements contained on diffetent layers would become juxta

posed, tesulting in a montage look. Montage is the default visual language

of composite organization of an image. Howevet, just as database suppOrtS

both the database form and its opposite-narrative-a composite organiza

tion of an image on the material level (and composi ting software on the level

of operations) suppOtrS twO opposing visual languages. One is modernist

MTV montage-two-dimensional juxtaposition of visual elements de

signed ro shock due ro its impossibility in reality. The other is the

representation of familiar reality as seen by a film camera (or its computer

simulation, in the case of 3-D graphics). During the 1980s and 1990s, all

image-making technologies became computer-based , thus turning all im

ages into composites. In parallel, a renaissance of montage (Ook place in vi

sual culture, in print, broadcast design, and new media. This is not

unexpected-after all, this is the visual language dictated by the composite

organization. What needs ro be explained is why photorealist images con

tinue to occupy such a significant space in our com purer-based visual culrure.

It would be surptising , of course, if phototealist images suddenly disap

peared completely. The history of culture does not comain such sudden

breaks. Similarly, we should not expect that new media would completely

replace narrative with database. New media does not radically break with

the past; rather, it distributes weight differently between the categories that

hold culture together, fotegrounding what was in the background , and vice

versa. As Ftederick] ameson writes in his analysis of anothet shift, that from

modernism to postmodernism: “Radical breaks between periods do not gen

erally involve complete changes bur rather the restructuration of a certain

The Forms

number of elements already given: featutes that in an earlier petiod of sys

tem were subordinare become dominant, and features rhar had been domi

nant again become secondary.”24

The database/narrarive opposition is a case in point. To further undet

stand how computer cultute rediscributes weighr berween the two terms of

opposition in computer culture, I will bring in the semiological rheory of

syntagm and paradigm. According to this model, originally formulared by

Ferdinand de Saussure to describe natural languages such as English and

larer expanded by Roland Barrhes and orhers ro apply to orher sign sysrems

(narrarive, fashion, food, erc.), rhe elements of a system can be relared in rwo

dimensions-rhe syntagmatic and paradigmatic. As defined by Barrhes,

“The synragm is a combination of signs , which has space as a supporr.” 25 To

use the example of narural language, rhe speaker produces an utrerance by

stringing rogerher elements, one after anorher, in a lineat sequence. This is

rhe syntagmaric dimension. Now let us look ar the paradigmaric dimension.

To continue wirh rhe example of rhe language user, each new element is cho

sen from a set of orher relared elements. For instance, all nouns form a ser; all

synonyms of a parricular word form anorher set. In rhe original formularion

of Saussure, “The unirs which have somerhing in common are associated in

theory and thus fotm groups wirhin which various relationships can be

found. “26 This is the paradigmatic dimension.

Elements in the syntagmatic dimension ate relared in /Jraesentia, while el

ements in the patadigmatic dimension are related in absentia. For instance,

in the case of a written sentence, rhe words rhat comprise it materially exist

on a piece of paper, while rhe paradigmaric sers ro which these words belong

only exisr in rhe wrirer’s and reader’s minds. Similarly, in rhe case of a fash

ion outfir, the elements rhar compose ir, such as skirr, blouse, and jacket, are

present in realiry, while pieces of clothing that could have been present in

stead-different skirr, different blouse, different jacker-exisr only in rhe

viewer’s imagination. Thus, syntagm is explicit and paradigm is implicit;

one is real and the orher is imagined.

24. FredricJam eson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Ami-Aesthetic: Esscqs 017

Pos/modem elllfllre. ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press , 198 3), 123 .

25. Barthes, Elements o/Semiology, 58.

26. Quoted in ibid. , 58.

Chapter 5

Lirerary and cinemaric narrarives work in rhe same way. Parricular words,

sentences, shors, and scenes rhar make up a narrarive have a marerial exis

rence ; orher elements rhar form rhe imaginary world of an aurhor or a par

ticular literary or cinemaric sryle, and rhar could have appeared insread, exisr

only virrually. Put diffetenriy, rhe database of choices from which narrarive

is construcred (the paradigm) is implicir; while rhe actual narrarive (rhe syn

ragm) is explicit.

New media reverse rhis relarionship. Darabase (the paradigm) is given

maretial exisrence, while narrarive (rhe syntagm) is dematerialised. Para

digm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed. Paradigm is real; syntagm, vir

tual. To see rhis , considet rhe new media design process. The design of any

new media objecr begins wirh assembling a darabase of possible elements to

be used. (Macromedia Director calls rhis darabase “cast,” Adobe Premiere

calls ir “project,” ProTools calls ir a “session,” bur rhe principle is rhe same.)

This darabase is rhe center of rhe design ptocess. Ir rypically consisrs of

a combinarion of original and srock marerial such as bu([ons, images , video

and audio sequences, 3-D objects, behaviors, and so on. Throughour the de

sign process, new elements are added DO rhe darabase; exisring elements are

modified. The narrarive is conscrucred by linking elements of rhis database

in a particular order, thar is by designing a trajectory leading from one ele

ment to another. On rhe mareriallevel, a narrarive is jusr a ser of links; rhe

elements themselves remain stored in rhe darabase. Thus rhe narrarive is vir

tual while rhe darabase exisrs materially.

The paradigm is privileged over syntagm in yer anorher way in interac

rive objecrs presenting rhe user wirh a number of choices ar rhe same rime

which is whar rypical interacrive interfaces do. For insrance, a screen may

contain a few icons; clicking on each icon leads rhe user to a different screen.

On rhe level of an individual screen, rhese choices form a paradigm of rheir

own rhat is explicirly presented co rhe user. On the level of rhe whole object,

rhe user is made aware rhar she is following one possible crajeccory among

many others. In orher words, she is selecring one trajecrory from the para

digm of all rrajectories rhat are defined.

Orhet rypes of interactive intetfaces make rhe paradigm even more ex

plicir by presenting rhe user with an explicir menu of all available choices.

In such interfaces, all of rhe caregories are always available, jusr a mouse click

away. The complere paradigm is present befote rhe user, irs elements nearly

arranged in a menu. This is anorher example of how new media make

The Forms

explicit the psychological processes involved in cultural communiCatIOn.

Other examples include the (already discussed) shift from creation to selec

tion, which externalizes and codifies the database of cultural elements exist

ing in the creator’s mind, as well as the very phenomena of interactive links.

As I noted in chapter one, new media takes “interacrion” literally, equating

it with a strictly physical interacrion between a user and a computer, at the

expense of psychological interaction. The cognitive processes involved in

understanding any cultural text are erroneously equated with an objectively

existing structure of interacrive links .

Interactive interfaces foreground the paradigmatic dimension and often

make explicit paradigmatic sets. Yet they are still organized along the syn

tagmatic dimension. Although the user is making choices at each new

screen, the end result is a linear sequence of screens that she follows. This is

the classical syntagmatic experience. In fact, it can be compared to con

structing a sentence in a natural language. ] ust as a language user construcrs

a sentence by choosing each successive word from a patadigm of other pos

sible words, a new media user creates a sequence of screens by clicking on

this or that icon at each screen. Obviously, thete are many important differ

ences between these two situations. For instance, in the case of a typical in

teractive interface, there is no grammar, and paradigms are much smaller.

Yet the similarity of basic experience in both cases is quite interesting; in

both cases, it unfolds along a syntagmatic dimension.

Why does new media insist on this language-like sequencing;> My hy

pothesis is that they follow the dominant semiological order of the twen

tieth century-that of cinema . As I will discuss in more detail in the next

chapter, cinema replaced all other modes of narration with a sequential

narrative, an assembly line of shots that appeat on the scteen one at a time.

For centuties , a spatialized natrative in which all images appear simulta

neously dominated European vi sual culture; in the twentieth century it

was telegated to “minor” cultutal forms such as comics or technical illus

trations. “Real” culture of the twentieth century came to speak in linear

chains, aligning itself with the assembly line of the industrial society and

the Turing machine of the postindustrial era. New media continue this

mode, giving the user information one screen at a time. At least, thi s is the

case when it tries to become ” real ” culture (interactive narratives , games);

when it simply functions as an interface to information , it is not ashamed

to present much more information on the screen at once, whether in the

Chapter 5

form of tables, normal or pull-down menus, or lists . In particular, the ex

perience of a user filling in an online form can be compared to precine

matic spatialized narrative: in both cases, the user follows a sequence of

elements that are presented simultaneously.

A Database Complex

To what extent is the database form intrinsic to modern storage media;> For

instance, a typical music CD is a collection of individual tracks grouped to

gether. The database impulse also drives much of photography throughout

its history, from William Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature to August

Sander’s monumental typology of modern German society Face of Our Time,

to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s equally obsessive cataloging of water towers. Yet

the connecrion between storage media and database forms is not universal.

The prime exception is cinema. Here the storage media suppOrt the narra

tive imagination. 27 Why then, in the case of photogtaphy storage media,

does technology sustain database , whereas in the case of cinema it gives tise

to a modern narrative form par excellence) Does this have to do with the

method of media access) Shall we conclude that random-access media , such

as com purer storage formats (hard drives, removable disks, CD-ROMs ,

DVD), favor database , whereas sequential-access media, such as film, favor

narrative;> This does not hold either. For instance, a book, the perfect ran

dom-access medium , supports database forms such as photoalbums as well

as narrative forms such as novels.

Rather than trying to correlate database and narrative forms with mod

ern media and information technologies, or deduce them from these tech

nologies, I prefer to think of them as twO competing imaginations, twO basic

creative impulses, two essential responses to the world. Both have existed

long before modern media. The ancient Greeks produced long narratives,

such as Homer’s epic poems The Ifiad and The Odyssey; they also produced en

cyclopedias. The first fragments of a Greek encyclopedia to have survived

were the work ofSpeusippus , a nephew of Plato. Didetot wrote novels-and

also was in chatge of the monumental Encyclopfdie, the latgest publishing

27. Christian Metz, “The FiCtion Film and It s Spectator: A Metapsychological Study,” in Ap

pam / lIS, ed. Th eresa Hak Kyung Cha (New York: Tanam Press, 1980), p. 402 .

The Forms

http:imagination.27

projen of the eighteenth century. Competing ro make meaning out of the

world, database and narrative produce endless hybrids. It is hard ro find a

pure encyclopedia without any traces of a narrative in it and vice versa. For

instance, until alphabetical organization became popular a few centuries

ago, mOSt encyclopedias were organized thematically, with ropics covered in

a particular order (typically, corresponding ro the seven liberal arts.) At the

same rime, many narratives, such as the nove ls by Cervantes and Swift, and

even Homer ‘s epic poems-the founding narratives of the Western rradi

tion-traverse an imaginary encyclopedia.

Modern media is the new battlefield for the competition between data

base and narrative. It is tempting to read the history of this competition in
dramatic terms. First, the medium of visual recording-phorography

privileges catalogs, taxonomies, and lists. While the modern novel blos

soms, and academicians continue ro produce historical narrative paintings

rhroughout th e nineteenth century, in the realm of the new techno-image

of photography, database rules. The next visual recording medium

film-privileges narr ative. Almost all fictional film s are narratives, with

few exceptions. Magnetic tape used in video does not bring any substan

tial changes. Next , storage media-computer-controlled digital storage

devices-privil ege databases once again. Multimedia encyclopedias, vir

tual museums, pornography, artists ‘ CD-ROMs, library databases, Web

indexes, and, of course, the Web itself: The data base is more popular than

ever before.

The digital computer turns Out ro be the perfen medium for the database

form. Like a virus, databases infect CD-ROMs and hard drives, servers and

Web sites. Can we say that the database is the cultural form most character

istic of a compurer ;> In her 1978 article “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcis

sism,” probably rhe single most well-known article on video art, art hisrorian

Rosalind Krauss argued that video is not a physical medium but a psycho

logical one. In her analysis , “Video’s real medium is a psychological situation,

the very terms of which are ro withdraw attention from an external object

an Other-and invest it in the Self.” 28 In shorr, video art is a suppOrt for the

28. Rosalind Krauss, “Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism;’ in John Han hardt , ed. Video CIII

Iliyc(Rochester: Visual Studies Work shop, 1987), 184.

Chapter 5

psychological condition of narcissism. 29 Does new media similarly function

ro play Out a particular psychological condition, something that might be

called a “database complex”) In this respect, it is interesting that a database

imagination has accompanied computer art from its very beginning. In the

1960s, artists working with computers wrote programs to systematically ex

plore the combinations of different visual elements. In parr, they were fol
lowing an world trend s such as minimalism. Minimalist artists executed

works of art according to preexistent plans; they also creared series of images

or objects by systematically varying a single parameter. So when minimalist

artist Sol LeWin spoke of an artist’s idea as “th e machine which makes the

work,” it was only log ical ro substitute the human executing the idea with a

computer..iO At the same time, since the only way ro make pictutes with a

computer was by writing a computer program, the logic of computer pro

gramming itself pushed computer artists in the same directions. Thus, for

artist Frieder Nake, a computer was a “Universal Picture Generator,” capable

of producing every possible picture OUt of a combination of available picture

elements and colors. 31 In 1967 he published a portfolio of twelve drawings

29. This analysis can also be app li ed to many interactive computer installations. The user of

such an installation is present ed with her own image; the user is given the possibility ro play

wirh this image and also to observe how her movements trigger various effects. In a diffetent

sense, most new media, regardless of whether it represents ro the user her image or not, can be

said ro activa te the narcissistic condi ti on because th ey reptese nt to th e user her actions and

rheir res ulr s. In other wo rd s, it functions as a new kind of mitror thar re Rec ts not on ly th e hu

m an im age bur human activiries. This is a different kind of narci ssis m – not pa ss ive co nte m

plarion bur actio n. The use r moves th e cu rsor a rou nd the scree n, clicks on ico ns, presses the

keys on rhe keyboard, and sn on. Th e computer screen actS as a mirro r of th ese activities. Of

ten thi s mirror does not simply reRect bu r g reatly amp lifies the user’s actions-a second differ

ence from rraditional narcissism. For instance, clicking on a folder icon activates an anima tion

accompa nied by sound; pressing a burton on a game pad sends a character off ro climb a moun

tain ; and so on. But even without thi s amplification, the modern GUI functi ons as a mirror, al

ways re p resenting the image of th e user in the form of a cu rsor moving around the sc reen.

30. Quored in Sam Hunter and J ohn J acobus, M.odern Art: PClinting, Smlptllre, and An·hiteel”,.e,

3d ed. (New York: Ab ram s, 1992), 326.

31. Frank Dietrich, “Vis ual Intelli gence: Th e Fits r Decade of Computer Art 0965-1975),”

iEEE Compllter Graphic,. and Applicatiom (July 1985),39.

The Forms

http:colors.31

http:narcissism.29

that were obtained by successfully multiplying a square matrix by itself. An

other early com purer ani st Manfred Moh r produced numero us images that

recorded various transfo rmations of a bas ic cube.

Even more rem a rk a ble were films by J ohn Whirney, the pioneer of

compurer filmm akin g. His films such as P ennlltations (1967) , Arabesque

(1975) and others syste matically explored the transformations of geomet

ric form s obtained by manip ulating elemem ary mat hematical function s.

Thus they su bst itur ed success ive accumu lation of v isual effects for narra

t iv e, figuration, or even forma l developm enr. In stead th ey presemed th e

vi ewer w ith databases of effec ts. T his princip le reac hes its exrreme in

Whirney ‘s early fi l m Catalog, which was made with an analog compurer.

In his imponam book on new forms of cinema of the 1960s emided

Expanded Cinema (1970), critic Gene Youngb lood wri tes a bour this re

markable film: “The eld er Wh irney acrually never produced a complete,

coherem movie on th e analog com purer because he was comi nually de

veloping and refinin g the machine whi le using it for commercia l

work …. Ho wever, W hirne y did assemb le a visua l catalogue of the ef

fecrs he had perfecr ed ove r t he yea rs. Th is film , simp ly t ided Catalog, was

com pleted in 196 1 and proved co be of suc h overwhelm ing be aury that

many persons still prefer W hirne y’s ana logue work over his di gi t al com

purer film s.”32 On e is tempted co re ad Catalog as one of the found in g mo

mems of new media . As dis cussed in the “Selection” section, all software

for media creation coday arri ves with endless “plug-ins”-the banks of ef

fects that with a press of a bu((on generate imerestin g im ages from any

inpur whatsoever. In parallel, much of the aesthetics of co mpurerized vi

sua l cu lrure is effe cts-driven, especially when a new techno-genre (com

puter an imation , multimedia, Web sites) is first becoming estab l ished.

For ins tanc e , counrless music videos are var iati ons of Whirney’s Cat

alog-the o nl y difference is t hat the effecrs ate app lied co the im ages

of hum an performers. Th is is yet anot her examp le of ho w the logic of a

co mp u tet-in this case, the ability of a co mp ute r co produce endless vari

ations of elements an d co acr as a filter, rransforming it s inpur co yie ld a

new ourput – beco mes th e log ic of culrure at large.

32. G ene Youngb lood, EX/,anckd Cinema (New Yo rk: E . P. Durron and Co., (970), 2 10.

Chapter 5

D atabase Cinelna: Greenaway and Ve rtov

Altho ugh th e database form may be inherem to new medi a, counrless a t

tempts co create “imerac ti ve narratives ” testify co our dissatisfacrion wit h

the compurer in the sole role of encyclopedia or cata log of effecrs . We wam

new media narratives, and we wam these narrative s co be differem from the

narratives we have seen or read before. In fact , regardless of how often we re

peat in public th at the mod ern ist norion of m ediu m specifici ty (” every

medium should develop its own unique language”) is obsole te , we do expecr

co mpurer narrat ives co showcase new aesthetic possibilities that did not ex

ist before dig ital co mpurers. In shon , we want th em to be new media spe

cifi c. Given the dominance of the database in computer software and the key

ro le it plays in th e co mpurer-based design process, perh aps we can arrive ar

new kinds of narrative by focusing our a((emion on how narrative and data

base can work coge th er. How can a narrative take imo accou m the fac r thar

its elemems are organized in a database) H ow can ottr new abilities to store vast

amounts ofdata, to atltomatically classify, index, link, search, and instantly retrieve

it, lead to new kinds of narratives?

Peter Greenaway, one of rhe few prominent film direccors concerned with

expanding cinema ‘s lang uage, once complained that “t he linear pursuit

one srory at a time told chrono logicall y-is the standard format of cinema.”

Poiming our that cinema lags behind modern literarure in experimenting

with narrative, he asked: “Could it not travel on th e road where Joyce, Elior,

Borges and Perec have already ar rived )”33 While Greenaway is right ro di

rect filmm akers co more innovative literary narratives, new medi a arri srs

working on the database -prob lem ca n learn from cine ma “as it is .” For cin

ema already exists rig ht at the imersec tion between database and narrative.

We can think of all the materi al accum ul ated d uring shoot ing as forming a

database, especially since the shoo t ing sc hedule usuall y doe s not follow the

narrative of the fil m but is determ ined by production logistics. During ed

it ing, the edicor cons truct s a film narrative out of this data base, creating a

unique rraJeccory through the conceprual space of all possible fi lms tha t

cou ld have been constructed. From thi s perspective, every filmm ake r

33 . Pere r Gree naway, The Stairs-/H,mich – Projtaioll 2 (London: Merrell H olbe rron Pub

lishers, (995), 21.

The Forms

engages with the database-narrative probl em in every film, although only a

few have done so self-consc iousl y.

One exception is Greenaway himself. Throu g hout his career, he has been

working on the problem of how to recon cile database and narrat ive forms .

Many of his films progress by recounting a list of items, a catalog without

any inherenr order (for example, the different books in Prospero’s Books).

Working to und ermi ne a linear narrative, Greenaway uses different systems

ro order his films. He w rote about this approac h: “If a numerical, alphabetic

color-coding system is employed, it is done deliberately as a device, a con

struCt, to counterac t, dilute, augment or complement the all-pervading ob

sessive cinema interes t in plot , in narrative , in th e ‘I’m now going to tell you

a s[Ory’ school of film-making.” 34 His favorite system is numbers. The se

quence of numbers aCts as a narrative shell that “convinces” the viewer that

she is warching a narrative. In reality, the scenes th at follow one another are

not conneCted in any log ical way. By using numbers , Greenaway “wraps” a

minimal narrarive atO und a database. Although Greenaway ‘s database log ic

was alread y present in his “avant-garde ” films such as The FaLLs ( 980), it has

also structured hi s “co mm ercial” films. The Oral!ghtsman~ Contract (982) is

centered atO und twelve drawi ngs in the process of being made by a drafts

man. They do not fo rm any order; Greenaway emphasizes this by hav ing the

draftsman work on a few drawings at once. Eventuall y, Greenaway’s desire

to take “cinema Out of cinem a” led to his work on a series of installations and

museum exhibirions in rhe 1990s. No longer obliged to conform to the lin

ear medium of film, the elements of a database are spatialized within a mu

seum or even a whole city. This move can be read as the desire to create a

database in its most pure form-as a set of elements not ordered in any way.

If the elements exist in one d imen sion (the time of a film, the list on a page) ,

they w ill inevita bl y be ordered . So the only way [0 create a pure database is

to spatialize it , distributing the elements in space. Thi s is exactly the path

that Greenaway took . Situated in a three-dimensional space that does not

have an inherent narrative log ic, the 1992 install ation ” 100 Objects to Rep

resent the World ” by its very title proposes that the world should be under

34. Quored in Dav id Pascoe, Peter GreenawClY: M usemns Clild Moving fmages (London : Reak rio n

Boo ks, 1997),9-10.

Chapter 5

s[Ood throug h a ca talog rather than a narrative . At the same time , Green

away does not abandon narrative; he continues to investigate how database

and narrative can wo rk together. H avi ng presented ” 100 Ob jects ” as an in

stallation, Greenaway next turned it into an opera set. In th e opera, the nar

ratOr Thrope uses th e objeCts to cond uCt Adam and Eve throug h the whole

of human civilization, thus turning one hundred objects into a sequential

narrative. l ) In another install ation, “The Stairs, Munich , Projection ” (995),

Greenaway put up a hundred screens-each representing one year in the his

tOry of cinema-throug hout Munich. Again, Greenaway presents us with a

spatialized database- bur also with a narrativ e. By walking from one screen

[0 another, one foll ows cinema ‘s history. The project uses Greenaway’s fa

vorite principle of organization by numbers , pushing it to the extreme: The

projeCtions on the sc reens contain no fi g uration , jusr numbers. The screens

are numbered f[Om 1895 to 1995 , one screen for each year of cinema’s his

tOry. Along with numbers, Gree naway introduces another line of develop

ment : Each projeCtion is slig htly different in color. l6 The hundred colored

squares form an abstract narrative of their own that runs in parallel to the

linear narrative of cinema’s hi story. Finally, Greenaway superimposes ye t a

third narrative by dividing the hi stOry of cinema into five sec tions, each sec

tion staged in a different part of the city. The apparent triviality of the basic

narra ti ve of the project-one hund red numbers , standing for one hundred

yea rs of cinema’s histOry- “neurrali zes” the narrative, forcing the viewer to

focus on the phenomenon of the projeCted li g ht irself, which is the actual

subjeCt of this project.

Along with Greenaway, Dziga Vertov can be thoug ht of as a major “data

base filmm aker ” of the twentieth cemury. Man with a Movie Camera is perhaps

the most important example of a database imaginarion in modern media art.

In one of the key shots, repeated a few t imes throughour th e fi lm , we see an

editing room with a number of shelves used to keep and organ ize the shOt ma

terial. The shelves are marked “mach ines,” “club,” “th e movement of a city,”

“phys ical exercise,” “an illusionist ,” and so on. Thi s is the database of the

recorded materi al. The editor, VertOv’s wife, Eli zave ta Svilova, is shown

35. hrrp :ll www.cem-nanrerre.com /g ree na way -IOOo bj ecrs/ .

36. Greenaway, The Stairs , Mun ich. P”ojection 2, 47- 53 .

The Fo r ms

–

http:color.l6

working with this database-reuieving some reels, remrning used reels,

adding new ones.

Although I poimed our thar film editing in general can be compared ro cre

ating a uajecrory through a darabase, this comparison in the case of Man with

a Movie Camera constitures the very method of the film. Irs subjecr is the film

maker’s suuggle ro teveal (social) strucmte among the multimde of observed

phenomena. Irs projecr is a brave attempt at an empirical epistemology that

has bur one rool-perception. The goal is ro decode the world purely through

the surfaces visible ro the eye (namral sight enhanced, of course, by a movie

camera). This is how the film’s coaurhor Mikhail Kaufman describes it:

An otdinary person finds himself in some sort of environment, gets lost amidst the

zillions of phenomena, and observes these phenomena from a bad vantage point. He

registers one phenomenon very well, registers a second and a third, but has no idea

of where they may lead …. Bur the man with a movie camera is infused with the

particular thought that he is actually seeing the world for other people. Do you un

derstand? He joins these phenomena with others, from elsewhere, which may not

even have been filmed by him. Like a kind of scholar he is able to gathet empirical

observations in one place and then in another. And that is actually the way in which

the world has come to be understoodY

Therefore, in comrast ro standatd film editing that consists of selection and

ordering of previously shOt material according ro a preexistem script, here

the process of relating shOts ro each Othet, otdeting, and teordering them ro

discover the hidden order of the world constirutes the film’s method. Man

with a Movie Cameret uaverses its darabase in a parricular order ro construct

an argumem. Records drawn from a database and arranged in a particular

ordet become a picmte of modern life-but simultaneously an atgumem

abour this life, an imerpreration of what these images, which we encoumer

every day, every second, acmally mean. 38

Was this brave attempt successfuP The ovetall s((ucture of the film is

quite complex, and at first glance seems ro have litrle ro do with a database.

37. Mikhail Kaufman, “An Imerview,” October 11 (Wimer 1979): 65.

38. Ir can be said rhar Venov uses “rhe Kuleshov’s effecr” ro give meaning ro rhe darabase

records by placing rhem in a panicular order.

Chapter 5

JUSt as new media objects contain a hierarchy of levels (imerface-comem,

operating system-application, Web page-HTML code, high-level pro

gramming language-assembly language-machine language), Verrov’s

film contains at least thtee levels. One level is the sroty of a cameraman

shooting material for the film. The second level consists of the shots of the

audience watching the finished film in a movie theater. The third level is the

film itself, which consists of footage recotded in Moscow, Kiev, and Riga,

arranged according to the progression of a single day: waking up-work

leisure activities. If this third level is a text, the other two can be thought of

as its metatexts. 39 Vertov goes back and forth between the three levels, shift

ing between the text and its metatexts-between the producrion of the film,

its reception, and the film itself. Bur if we focus on the film within the film

(i.e., the level of the text) and disregard the special effecrs used to create

many of the shots, we discover almost a linear printOur, so to speak, of a data

base-a number of shots showing machines, followed by a number of shots

showing work activities, followed by differem shots of leisure, and so on.

The paradigm is projected onro the symagm. The result is a banal, mechan

ical caralog of subjects that one could expecr to find in the city of the

1920s-running trams, city beach, movie theaters, factOries …

Of course, watching Man with a Movie Camera is anything bur a banal ex

perience. Even after the 1990s, when designers and video-makers systemat

ically had exploited every avam-garde device, the original still looks suiking.

What makes its striking is not its subjects and the associations Vertov tries to

establish between them ro impose “the communist decoding of the world,”

bur rathet the most amazing catalog of film techniques comained within it.

Fades and superimpositions, freeze-frames, acceleration, split screens, various

types of rhythm and imercurting, differem momage techniques 4°-what

39. Linguisrics, semiorics, and philosophy use rhe concepr of meralanguage. Meralanguage is

rhe language used for rhe analysis of objecr language. Thus a meralanguage may be rhoughr of

as a language abour anorher language. A merarexr is a rexr in meralanguage abour a rexr in ob

ject language. For insrance, an anicle in a fashion magazine is a merarexr abour rhe rexr of

clorhes. Or an HTML file is a merarexr rhar describes the text of a Web page.

40. We should remember that various tempo tal montage techniques were still a novelty in

the 1920s; they had the same status for viewers then as “special effects” such as 3-D characters

have for viewers roday. The original viewers ofVerrov’s film probably experienced it as one long

special-effects sequence.

The Forms

http:metatexts.39

—

film scholar Annette Michelson has called “a summation of the resources and

techniques of the silem cinema”41-and of course, a multi rude of unusual ,

“constfUcrivist” poims of view are s[[ung rogether with such density that the

film cannot simply be labeled “avam-garde.” If a “normal ” avam-garde film

still proposes a coherem language differenr from the language of mainsrream

cinema, that is, a small set of techniques that are repeated , Mall with a Movie

Camera never arrives at anything like a well-defined language. Rather, it pro

poses an umamed, and apparendy endless, unwinding of techniques, or, ro

use comemporary lang uage, “effects,” as cinema’s new way of speaking.

Traditionally, a personal artistic lang uage or a style common ro a group

of cui rural objects or a period requires a stability of paradigms and consis

tem expecrations as ro which elemems of paradigmatic sets may appear in a

given siruation. For example, in the case of classic Hollywood style, a viewer

may expecr that a new scene will begin with an establishing shot or that a

panicular lighting convemion such as high key or low key will be used

throughour the film . (David Bordwell defines a Hollywood style in terms of

paradigms ranked in terms of probabilities.)42

The endless new possibilities provided by comp urer software hold the

promise of new cinematic languages , bur at the same time they ptevem such

lang uages from coming imo being. (l am using the example of film, bur the

same logic applies ro all other areas of com purer-based visual culrure.) Since

every software comes with numerous sets of rransitions , 2-D filters, 3-D

rransformations, and other effecrs and “plug-ins ,” the anist , especially the

beginner, is tempted co use many of them in the same work. In such a case,

a paradigm becomes the symagm; that is, tather than making singular

choices from the se ts of possible techniques , or, ro use the term of Russian

formalist s, devi ces , and then repeating them throughom the work (for in

stance, using only curs, or only cross-dissolves), th e anist ends up using

many options in the same work. Ultimately, a digital film becomes a list of

differem effecrs, which appear one after another. Whimey ‘s Catalog is the ex

[[erne expression of this logic.

4 1. Ibid.,55.

42. David Bordwell, “Classical H ollywood Film ,” in Philip Rosen, ed. , NCIYY<7tive, Appcrl'atllS,

Ideology: Film Theory Ri!Llder( New York: Columbia Universiry Press, 1987).

Chapter 5

The possibility of creating a stable new lang uage is also subverred by the

cons tam imroducrion of new techniques over time. Thus the new media par

adigms not only comain many more options than old media paradigms, bur

they also keep g rowing. And in a culrure ruled by the log ic of fashion, that

is, the demand for cons tam innovation, anists tend co adopt newly available

options while simultaneously dropping already familiar ones. Every year,

every month, new effects find their way into media works, disp lac ing previ

ously prominent ones and d es tabilizing any stable expecrations that viewers

might have begun ro form.

And this is why Verrov’s film has parti cul ar relevance to new media. It

proves that it is possib le ro rurn “effecrs ” into a meaningful artist ic language.

Why is it that in Whimey ‘s compmer film s and music videos effecrs are juSt

effecrs, whereas in the hands of Vertov they acquire meaning- Because in

Verrov’s film they are motivated by a particular argumem, which is that the

new techniques of obtaining images and manipulating them, summed up by

Vertov in his term “kino-eye,” can be used ro decode the world. As the film

progresses, s[[aight footage gives way ro manipulated footage; newet tech

niques appear one after another, reaching a roll er-coas ter intensity by the

film ‘s end-a [[ue orgy of cinemarography. It is as though Vertov testages

his discovery of the kino-eye for us , and along wi th him , we g radually real

ize the full range of possibilities offered by the camera. Vertov’s goal is ro se

duce us into his way of seeing and thinking, to make us share his excitemem,

as he discovers a new language for film. This gradual process of discovery is

film’s main narrative, and it is cold through a catalog of discoveties. Thus in

the hands ofVerrov, the database, this normally static and “objecrive” form,

becomes dynamic and subjecrive. More important, Vertov is able ro achieve

so mething that new media designers and arti sts still have ro learn-how ro

merge d atabase and narrative imo a new form.

The Forms

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