Digital Baroque Electronic Mediations Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors 26 Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds Timothy Murray 25 Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path Terry Harpold 24 Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now Gary Hall 23 Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet Lisa Nakamura 22 Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors 21 The Exploit: A Theory of Networks Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker 20 Database Aesthetics Victoria Vesna, Editor 19 Cyberspaces of Everyday Life Mark Nunes 18 Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture Alexander R. Galloway 17 Avatars of Story Marie-Laure Ryan 16 Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi Timothy C. Campbell 15 Electronic Monuments Gregory L. Ulmer 14 Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky 13 The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory Thomas Foster 12 Déjà Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory Peter Krapp For more books in the series, see page 311. Digital Baroque New Media Art and Cinematic Folds timothy murray 26 Electronic Mediations, Volume university of minnesota press minneapolis london • Copyright2008by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press 111Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Murray, Timothy. Digital baroque : new media art and cinematic folds / Timothy Murray. p. cm.—(Electronic mediations ; v. 26) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN978-0-8166-3401-9(hc : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8166-3402-6(pb : alk. paper) 1. Video recordings. 2. Digital video. 3. Installations (Art). 4. Civilization, Baroque. I. Title. PN1992.945.M872008 791.4—dc22 2008030996 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my life partners in the cinematic fold, Renate, Ashley, and Erin This page intentionally left blank contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Baroque Folds and Digital Incompossibilities 1 I. From Video Black to Digital Baroque 1. Digital Baroque: Performative Passage from Hatoum to Viola 35 2. Et in Arcadia Video: Poussin’ the Image of Culture with Thierry Kuntzel and Louis Marin 58 II. Digital Deleuze: Baroque Folds of Shakespearean Passage 3. The Crisis of Cinema in the Age of New World-Memory: The Baroque Legacy of Jean-Luc Godard 85 4. You Are How You Read: Baroque Chao-Errancy in Greenaway and Deleuze 111 III. Present Past: Digitality, Psychoanalysis, and the Memory of Cinema 5. Digitality and the Memory of Cinema: Bearing the Losses of the Digital Code 137 6. Wounds of Repetition in the Age of the Digital: Chris Marker’s Cinematic Ghosts 159 7. Philosophical Toys and Kaleidoscopes of the Unfamiliar: The Haunting Voices of Toni Dove and Zoe Beloff 178 8. Digital Incompossibility: Cruising the Aesthetic Haze of New Media 195 IV. Scanning the Future 9. Psychic Scansion: The Marker of the Digital In-Between 217 10. Time @ Cinema’s Future: New Media Art and the Thought of Temporality 238 Notes 261 Publication History 291 Index 293 Preface Digital Baroque. What happens when two nouns, “the digital” and “the Baroque,” are conjoined without articles to anchor them: digital/Baroque? Does the one, “digital,” play the qualifying adjective to the weightier noun, “Baroque”? Does the adjective signify something of the digit, the deictic, the gestural, and the rhetorical nature of the Baroque, as in the baroque trope faire voir?Or might the terms without their articles also stand juxta- posed analogically in enigmatic difference: digital (,) Baroque or Baroque (,) digital—something like 1 (,) 0? Perhaps they thus stand figurally as if enfolded into one another, thereby signifying the paradox and enigma of analogy itself. Might not we understand analogy as something not simply transcended by digitality but as something deeply cryptic and disturbingly disjunctive that is deeply crucial to digitality’s structure and representations? As for digitality, is it even possible to distinguish the digital / the deictic from the digital / the algebraic? Can we make a clean numerical break from the rhetorical tradition? The conceit of Digital Baroque multiplies when we add to this titular mix the histories, thresholds, and memories of cinema, to which this book gives particular attention, as they have been enfolded into new media art. Does new media stand forth as the memento mori of cinema? Does the Baroque function as a marker of the death of cinema in the twenty-first century, as an energetic carrier of the figures of mourning, melancholia, and even ascesis so fundamental to the Baroque? And what is implied by cin- ema’s frequent identification with the Baroque, particularly by pioneering ix