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I'm not sure if members will engage such a lengthy volume of text, but I thought I'd provide an essay to provide further detail to this creative project. (Excuse the evident dyslexic writing)
In this essay I will attempt to explore the relationship that my MA practical production proposal has with its mode of production and distribution across a new media network.
[W]e can define new media as new cultural forms, which depend on computers for presentation and distribution: Web sites, virtual worlds, virtual reality, multimedia, computer games, computer animation .
My proposed production is to produce two 10 minute pilot episodes for playback across a range of digital devices through viral distribution via internet download. The actuality of digital production has been evident for several years, with the application of digital video cameras, non-linear editing platforms and affordable DVD authoring. This computer facilitated mode of creation is reminiscent of the evolution of computer audio technology that permitted music production within a digital environment outside of the recording studio. This apparent liberation, tied to dance culture revolution, exploded in the late 80s, generating a multitude of independent artists/producers and record labels .
This application of digital technology to music was hugely informed by the DIY ethic from the 70s punk culture . This ethic inspired bands and musicians to take control of their own recording and distribution, pressing records independently of the established labels .
This DIY ethic can be applied to digital video production with the mode of creation now affordable to many directors outside of the media industry. Home produced productions on DVD are possible, but are limited to the physical conveyance of the actual discs. The method of reproduction also carries costs that are expensive in relation to mass production used by mainstream media companies.
In 1999, Shawn Fanning launched a new program that was to change how many people used the internet: Napster. The software enabled music fans to swap songs stored on their computers with each other and to find each other through a central directory. Napster users could trade in bootlegs, rare tracks and current releases by major artists.
An alternative to the manufacture of DVDs and other data storage devices has been achieved by audio technology and is now common place. The development of mp3 file extensions led initially to the peer to peer (P2P) file sharing of music across the internet , and is now coupled with the development of portable digital audio players. These devices, such as Ipod , allow the user to download music from his computer and listen to playback on the move. This technology allows a user to download music from the internet and transfer this onto a portable player, with the same functionality as a Sony Walkman. The necessity for a storage disc or memory card has been removed, and thus the need for finance of this reproduction.
File transfer across the internet of moving image files, such as .avi and .mov extensions, is common place on the net, but it has only been recently that portable media devices have been released to liberate the files from the computer and facilitate handheld playback by the user. Various devices are now capable of video and audio playback, these include Pocket PCs, originally business based peripherals these machines operate in a similar fashion to a personal computer, executing files through operating system software, Portable Media Centres are specifically designed for multimedia playback and finally smartphones , and these telecommunication devices are capable of multimedia playback, including video files.
This digital technology effectively presents a new media network incorporating the internet to personal computer/smartphone and then the possibility of transfer between portable media devices, enable via cable, Bluetooth or wi-fi connections. P2P file sharing need not exist as a purely internet based act and alternative methods of file exchange already exist in the form of multimedia text messaging.
Without the necessity of publish media files onto disc an opportunity arises to distribute digital moving image completely outside of the conventional modes of presentation and to a global audience effortlessly. The notion of a mass audience, with respect to cinema projection and television broadcast, is radically reinvented with a highly individuated viewership capable of choosing not only their time of consumption, but also place and velocity (viewing whilst travelling)
The punk DIY ethic is reborn within moving image production and distribution, negating the gatekeeping of the media industry and channels of exhibition.
Digital media as body without organs
To compliment this new approach to digital moving image it is necessary to explore other ways of defining what it is and how it is capable of such movement across a network. Anna Munster creates the approach of Digitality as a way of redefining the aesthetics of digital art/media by applying the work of Deleuze to the form, and it is interesting note that this proposed method of distribution also plays with the notion of proximity that Munster discusses as a defining point of an aesthetic of sensation.
Relations of proximity operate at a number of levels: the closeness digital media continue to maintain and develop with other media such as cinema and photography, the redistribution of spatial and temporal relations into an experience of virtual nearness, and the kinship of the immateriality of informatics with the material strata of organic and inorganic bodies .
The mode of production is notable for its development alongside the traditional notion of moving image production. The basic approach to production still emulates that of celluloid film by following the same roots of visual language montage and composition. In fact a lack of divergence from celluloid has meant that digital is often treated as a poor substitute for film. Programs such as Magic Bullet have been designed to provide digital footage with an approximation of celluloid.
Although this position is being challenged by an applied manifesto, Dogme , that was initiated by a group of Danish directors. They have chosen to embrace digital technology within their productions as part of a liberating act devised to diminish the visual aesthetic hold that film has embodied through conventional cinematic techniques. Philosophical questions are raised on truth and reality that the digital code has been able to convey .
Proximity can also be perceived in the mode of consumption presented by my proposal. The user is encouraged to develop a more personal relationship with the digital media through a one to one playback encounter by the mobile device. This intimate proximity is an individuated relationship rather than a collective experience and leads on to notions of machinic assemblages.
The body conceived of as a machinic assemblage becomes a body that is multiple. Its function or meaning no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies .
This Deleuzian statement by Peter Malins is used to further the notion that the digital media is not mere code but a body without organs as is the user. This is premised upon Spinozist conceptions of the univocity of being: that everything has the same oncological status.. Therefore the body without organs refers to all bodies: animate, inanimate, human, inhuman, textual, social and cultural as well as biological .
This leap in defining the nature of digital media in such a democratising fashion relates back to Munster’s writing on digital aesthetics. The body without organs and the machinic assemblage are fundamental points underpinning the work of Deleuze, Guattari and later Massumi. Anna has appropriated these to facilitate a reading of an aesthetic of sensation. This is achieved by travelling further along this philosophical theory to relate virtuality and affect, how potential experiences are brought into being as sensation.
Although my essay is not concerned with presenting a reading of the content of the proposed pilot episodes and as such a conscious application of affect theory, it is contextually important to how the sensations come into being. Brian Massumi develops an understanding that the body does not produce sensation through specific sense organs, but rather affect is synethetic . Synethesis is a condition where one sensory mode is transformed into another, colours smelt and sounds seen. The most common effect is the gut reaction to the sight of blood, gore and violence.
Rather than be drawn further into discussion on the complexity of this matter I would like to turn the focus instead back towards the notion of the body without organs and the machinic assemblage and how these are defined by movement. Deleuze is able to abstract the concept of the body by applying the term ‘becoming’ in its formation, this philosophical term implies movement, speed, velocity and intensity. The whole process involves the deterratorialization of the body, liberating it from a material essentialist point of view. The movement or speeds at which it travels are lines of flight, between the determinations or singularities. These singularities are formed by the process of affect creating a bifurcation point within the potential or virtual.
Deleuze and Guattari used the term Rhizome to express the network of multiplicitous lines that operate in their theory of becoming and the body without organs. It is this complex interaction by defining bodies through a relationship of movements that is key to appreciating the nature of digital media distribution.
Conceptually we can consider the ‘space of interaction’ of the viral web as a rhizomatic network
Viral Network Distribution
My proposal mentioned earlier focuses on the use of the internet as a network by which to disperse my pilot episodes to the audience. The internet is not the final point of distribution, with the digital media being transferred to portable media devices and further potential transference across a machinic assemblage network of user device to user device. The potential exists for the digital body to re-enter the internet or be published on a data storage disc separate from the initial mode of production and distribution. This inherently designed lack of control helps to perpetrate a viral spread.
The term virus is used here to refer to chain of P2P exchanges of the digital body, in comparison to distinct distribution from a central point. Although the initial point of download may exist as a singularity on the internet, this does not predetermine a boundary to dispersal. A method to deterratorialize this would be to make the download of the pilots available on other sites, thus spreading the digital body across the internet.
Viral marketing (distribution) describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message (digital body) to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message's (body’s) exposure and influence.
The decision to utilise a method of viral distribution is attractive, not only because it shifts the act of transference off of the digital media producer and onto the audience themselves, but also the digital body will remain in a constant state of activity, moving from one memory device to another, developing new lines of flight.
Research within the make up of the relationships between the points on the web has led to a new model for networks that allows for the potential of a wide spread in distribution at a rapid rate. Discoveries were made when web crawlers returned with the first data to starting mapping internet node connection, what they found was a scale-free network.
Scale-free networks, including the Internet, are characterized by an uneven distribution of connectedness. Instead of the nodes of these networks having a random pattern of connections, some nodes act as "very connected" hubs, a fact that dramatically influences the way the network operates .
The effect of this form of network is that bodies can spread at great rates once they hit a hub with a huge volume of connectedness. In terms of computer virus infection, it means that a network will become critical at a zero threshold. In comparison the previously conceived random network would offer some levels of resistance to infection, as the virus attempted to spread across a homogenous topology. The average number of connections of each node limits the percentage of the network that the virus can travel to at each step.
This zero threshold of infection in a scale-free network is extremely useful when applied to the distribution of the digital body. Instead of being concerned with the targeting of promotion and access to a large volume of users, it is more beneficial to target very connected hubs.
Seth Godin, in his Unleashing the Ideavirus, refers to the human version of very connected hubs as sneezers. Once infected with the digital body they are highly contagious and able to infect numerous others. Their ability to achieve this is not simply down to connectedness, but also credibility that gets others to believe them.
Hotmail is a great example of how the application of virus distribution across a scale-free network rapidly established this e-mail provider globally within a relatively short period of time. Using the following strategy Hotmail gained 30 million users within 30 months . The key part was the service advertised itself, users signed up for a free e-mail provider and each e-mail they sent contained a link to allow the recipient to sign up for their own account. The use of the service perpetuated its own marketing, with sneezers infecting large numbers through their prolific contact with an extended social/business network.
Distribution within the manner of my proposal does not rely on a purely internet based network and the targeting of sneezers within the P2P user device open-scale network will be crucial. The human is a part of this network facilitating distribution.
Consideration will be necessary to open up the end user agreement for the digital body. Current agreements about the downloading of music apply limits on the distribution of the media, due to the need to control the revenue stream created by selling content . If the media is provided free then it is possible to open up this agreement to permit others to multiply and distribute the digital body. Alternative revenue streams will be required to recuperate production costs, but this is possible by leading users back to a website containing either sponsorship or key purchased additional media with a url in the credits/title of the digital body.
Transduction and mutation
The focus of this essay now shifts to the effect of the transference of the digital body across a new media network, one user device to another. I find it applicable to refer to this as transduction, a term Massumi took from Simondon that denotes a transformation as part of the transference. Massumi applies this specifically to analogue processes within his writing , noting a qualitive difference between the mediums/devices.
This qualitive difference I equate to the encoding and compression is required to transduct the digital body across a network of various portable media devices. Currently there is no one standard file extension and size that enables playback on the plethora of devices available. It is necessary to re-encode the digital body and in doing so effect the nature of that body and the affective qualities within the machinic assemblage in relation to the user.
This mutation resulting from transduction is not an effect on a copy of the digital body, but by following Deleuze and Guattari’s train of thought with regards the simulacrum, the result is a body defined as an individual devoid of any reference to the previous media.
A common definition of the simulacrum is a copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a model .
This means that the act of distribution creates new individuated versions of the digital body, each one containing qualitive differences; pixilation, audio clipping, colour variation, and other playback variants. The media is open and not closed or permanently defined; the body without organs is susceptible to variation in its assemblage.
The encoding software used to reconfigure the digital code of the media has the same effect as the transportation device from Massumi’s example of simulacrum , in the film The Fly (1986). The accident that leaves the scientist Brundle fused with the DNA of a house fly creates something new, separate from the body that Brundle was originally. The copy has changed as is something distinct from its referent.
Taken into account the transduction of the digital body presents the reality that there is no one definitive version of the pilot episodes, but rather the continuing transformation of the digital body into new variations.
Summary
The analysis in this assignment has been concern with relationship that my MA practical production proposal has with its mode of production and distribution. Through the application of Spinozan philosophy via Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi, an approach has developed that reveals digital media that is chaotic.
By chaotic I refer to the lack of control that exists in the method of distribution, where the human element within the new media network chooses where and how the episodes are dispersed. The dispersal of these is also subject to the skewed connectivity of open-scale networks, where sneezers can effect a zero threshold infection. The second is with reference the openness of the digital body as it moves across the topological plane, constantly changing through transduction from one machinic assemblage to another. The technology permits mass reproduction of the digital body and thus pushing it towards simulacrum.
I begin to question whether the process of production and distribution are linear or non-linear. Nonlinearity would appear to exist in the lack of one definable finished digital body. The constant transduction seems to take the episodes out of a linear process. This is heightened by the rhizome distribution where the digital body moves in all manner of directions at once, without a definable singular path across the network.
All of this does not simply occur within a digital coded state, but rather as Massumi takes great effort to make clear, as an exchange between analogue and digital. The digital body exists as binary code that is transferred to analogue light and sound signals upon playback. The digital reality is merely part of the process involving a binary codification of the media. Massumi argues that the potential or virtual can never be approximated by the digital. For him the closest it gets is the possible, perceived determinations. |
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