TRANSMEDIA FRICTIONS The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities EDITED BY Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS TRANSMEDIA FRICTIONS TRANSMEDIA FRICTIONS The Digital, the Arts, and the Humanities EDITED BY Marsha Kinder and Tara McPherson UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, CA © 2014 by The Regents of the University of California Cataloguing-in-Publication Data on fi le at the Library of Congress. ISBN 978-0-520-28185-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-520-95769-5 (ebook) Manufactured in the United States of America 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 2002) (Permanence of Paper). Cover image: From Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O'Neill (2002). Image courtesy of Pat O'Neill and The Labyrinth Project. We dedicate this volume to all those who have created new demands by working at the pressure point between theory and practice—not only those historic fi lmmakers like Eisenstein, Vertov, and Deren whose experimentation we are still mining for theoretical implications, but also those contemporary theorists who have generated transmedia frictions by venturing into the realm of production. One of the foremost tasks of art has always been the creation of a demand which could be fully satisfi ed only later. The history of every art form shows critical epochs in which a certain art form aspires to eff ects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard, that is to say, in a new art form. Every fundamentally new, pioneering creation of demands will carry beyond its goal. WALTER BENJAMIN CONTENTS Acknowledgments • xi Preface: Origins, Agents, and Alternative Archaeologies • xiii PART I. MEDIUM SPECIFICITY AND PRODUCTIVE PRECURSORS Medium Specifi city and Productive Precursors: An Introduction • 3 Marsha Kinder Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specifi c Analysis • 20 N. Katherine Hayles Postmedia Aesthetics • 34 Lev Manovich If–Then–Else: Memory and the Path Not Taken • 45 Edward Branigan Cyberspace and Its Precursors: Lintsbach, Warburg, Eisenstein • 80 Yuri Tsivian Past Indiscretions: Digital Archives and Recombinant History • 100 Steve Anderson Films Beget Digital Media • 115 Stephen Mamber Navigating the Ocean of Streams of Story • 126 Grahame Weinbren Is This Not a Screen? Notes on the Mobile Phone and Cinema • 147 Caroline Bassett PART II. DIGITAL POSSIBILITIES AND THE REIMAGINING OF POLITICS, PLACE, AND THE SELF Digital Possibilities and the Reimagining of Politics, Place, and the Self: An Introduction • 161 Tara McPherson Transnational/National Digital Imaginaries • 180 John Hess and Patricia R. Zimmermann Is (Cyber) Space the Place? • 198 Herman Gray Linkages: Political Topography and Networked Topology • 211 David Wade Crane The Database City: The Digital Possessive and Hollywood Boulevard • 236 Eric Gordon Cuba, Cyberculture, and the Exile Discourse • 259 Cristina Venegas Thinking Digitally/Acting Locally: Interactive Narrative, Neighborhood Soil, and La Cosecha Nuestra Community • 272 John T. Caldwell Video Installation Art as Uncanny Shock, or How Bruce Nauman’s Corridors Expand Sensory Life • 291 Mark B. N. Hansen Braingirls and Fleshmonsters • 316 Holly Willis Tech-illa Sunrise (.txt con Sangrita) • 330 Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Guillermo Gómez-Peña Works Cited • 339 Index • 373 viii • CONTENTS CONTRIBUTORS STEVE ANDERSON GUILLERMO GÓMEZ-PEÑA University of Southern California (USC) Artist Los Angeles, California San Francisco, California CAROLINE BASSETT ERIC GORDON University of Sussex Emerson College Brighton, United Kingdom Boston, Massachusetts EDWARD BRANIGAN HERMAN GRAY University of California at Santa Barbara University of California at (UCSB) Santa Cruz Santa Barbara, California Santa Cruz, California JOHN T. CALDWELL MARK B. N. HANSEN University of California at Los Angeles Duke University (UCLA) Durham, North Carolina Los Angeles, California N. KATHERINE HAYLES DAVID WADE CRANE Duke University Independent Scholar Durham, North Carolina San Francisco, California ix