Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
Cultural Software
German media and literary theorist Friedrich Kittler
wrote that the students today should know at least
two software languages; only then they'll be able to
say something about what 'culture' is at the
moment.6 Kittler himself programs in an assembler
language - which probably determined his distrust of
Graphical User Interfaces and modern software
applications, which use these interfaces. In a
Computer as a Metamedium
As we have established, the development of
computational media runs contrary to previous
media history. But in a certain sense, the idea of a
new media gradually discovering its own language
actually does apply to the history of computational
media after all. And just as it was the case with
printed books and cinema, this process took a few
decades. When first computers were built in the
middle of the 1940s, they could not be used as
media for cultural representation, expression and
communication. Slowly, through the work of
Sutherland, Englebart, Nelson, Papert and others in
the 1960s, the ideas and techniques were developed
which made computers into a cultural machine.
One could create and edit text, made drawings,
move around a virtual object, etc. And finally, when
Kay and his colleagues at PARC systematized and
refined these techniques and put them under the
umbrella of GUI that made computers accessible to
multitudes, a digital computer finally was given its
Introduction
Having explored the logic of media hybridity using
examples drawn from different areas of digital
culture, I now want to test its true usefulness by
looking at a single area in depth. This area is moving
image design. A radically new visual language of
moving images emerged during the period of 19931998 which is the same period when filmmakers
and designers started systematically using media
authoring and editing software running on PCs.
Today this language dominates our visual culture.
We see it daily in commercials, music videos, motion
graphics, TV graphics, design cinema, interactive
interfaces of mobile phone and other devices, the
web, etc. Below we will look at what I perceive to be
some of its defining features: variable continuously
changing forms, use of 3D space as a common
platform for media design, and systematic
integration of previously non-compatible media
techniques.
How did this language come about? I believe that
looking at software involved in the production of
moving images goes a long way towards explaining
why they now look the way they do. Without such
analysis we will never be able to move beyond the
commonplace generalities about contemporary
culture post-modern, global, remix, etc. to
actually describe the particular languages of different
design areas, to understand the causes behind them
and their evolution over time. In other words, I think
Deep Remixability
I believe that media hybridity constitutes a new
fundamental stage in the history of media. It
manifests itself in different areas of culture and not
only moving images although the later does offer a
particularly striking example of this new cultural logic
at work. Here media authoring software environment
became a kind of Petri dish where the techniques
and tools of computer animation, live
cinematography, graphic design, 2D animation,
typography, painting and drawing can interact,
generating new hybrids. And as the examples above
demonstrate, the result of this process of hybridity
are new aesthetics and new media species which
cannot be reduced to the sum of media that went
into them.
Can we understand the new hybrid language of
moving image as a type of remix? I believe soif we
make one crucial distinction. Typical remix combines
content within the same media or content from
different media. For instance, a music remix may
combine music elements from any number of artists;
anime music videos may combine parts of anime
films and music taken from a music video.
Professionally produced motion graphics and other
moving-image projects also routinely mix together
content in the same media and/or from different
media. For example, in the beginning of the Go
music video, the video rapidly switches between liveaction footage of a room and a 3D model of the
same room. Later, the live-action shots also
incorporate a computer-generated plant and a still
photographic image of mountain landscape. Shots of
a female dancer are combined with elaborate
animated typography. The human characters are
transformed into abstract animated patterns. And so
on.
Such remixes of content from different media are
definitely common today in moving-image culture. In
fact, I begun discussing the new visual language by
pointing out that in the case of short forms such
Introduction
For the larger part of the twentieth century, different
areas of commercial moving image culture
maintained their distinct production methods and
distinct aesthetics. Films and cartoons were
produced completely differently and it was easy to
tell their visual languages apart. Today the situation
is different. Softwarization of all areas of moving
image production created a common pool of
techniques that can be used regardless of whether
one is creating motion graphics for television, a
narrative feature, an animated feature, or a music
video. The abilities to composite many layers of
imagery with varied transparency, to place 2D and
3D visual elements within a shared 3D virtual space
and then move a virtual camera through this space,
to apply simulated motion blur and depth of field
effect, to change over time any visual parameter of a
frame are equally available to the creators of all
forms of moving images.
The existence of this common vocabulary of
software-based techniques does not mean that all
films now look the same. What it means, however, is
that while most live action films, animated features
and motion graphics do look quite distinct today, this
is the result of a deliberate choices rather than the
inevitable consequence of differences in production
methods and technology.
Given that all techniques of previously distinct media
are now available within a single software-based
production environment, what is the meaning of the
terms that were used to refer to these media in the
twentieth century such as animation? From the
industry point of view, the answer is simple.
Animation not only continues to exist as a distinct
catches up. What does this idea imply for the future
of images and in particular 2D / 3D hybrids as
developed by Gaeta and others? As Gaeta pointed
out in 2003, while his method can be used to make
all kinds of images, so far it was used in the service
of realism as it is defined in cinema i.e., anything
the viewer will see has to obey the laws of physics.148
So in the case of The Matrix, its images still have
traditional realistic appearance while internally they
are structured in a completely new way. In short, we
see the old superstructure which stills sits on top of
old infrastructure. What kinds of images would we
see then the superstructure would finally catch up
with the infrastructure?
Of course, while the images of Hollywood special
effects movies so far follow the constraint of realism,
i.e. obeying the laws of physics, they are also
continuously expanding the boundaries of what
realism means. In order to sell movie tickets,
DVDs, and all other merchandise, each new special
effects film tries to top the previous one showing
something that nobody has seen before. In The
Matrix 1 it was bullet time; in The Matrix 2 it was
the Burly Brawl scene where dozens of identical
clones fight Neo; in Matrix 3 it was the
Superpunch.149 The fact that the image is
constructed differently internally does allow for all
kinds of new effects; listening to Gaeta it is clear
that for him the key advantage of such image is the
possibilities it offers for virtual cinematography. That
is, if before camera movement was limited to a small
and well-defined set of moves pan, dolly, roll
now it can move in any trajectory imaginable for as
long as the director wants. Gaeta talks about the
Burly Brawl scene in terms of virtual choreography:
both choreographing the intricate and long camera
moves impossible in the real word and also all the
bodies participating in the flight (all of them are
digital recreations assembled using Total Capture
method). According to Gaeta, creating this one scene
took about three years. So while in principle Total
Capture represents one of the most flexible way to
recreate visible reality in a computer so far, it will be
PART 3: Webware
modern industry.186 In some areas such as largescale production of Hollywood animated features or
computer games we see more of the factory logic at
work with extensive division of labor. In the case of
software engineering, software is put together to a
large extent from already available software modules
- but this is done by individual programmers or
teams who often spend months or years on one
project quite different from Ford production line
model used assembling one identical car after
another in rapid succession. In short, today cultural
modularity has not reached the systematic character
of the industrial standardization circa 1913.
But this does not mean that modularity in
contemporary culture simply lags behind industrial
modularity. Rather, cultural modularity seems to be
governed by a different logic. In terms of packaging
and distribution, mass culture has indeed achieved
complete industrial-type standardization. In other
words, all the material carriers of cultural content in
the 20th century have been standardized, just as it
was done in the production of all other goods - from
first photo and films formats in the end of the
nineteenth century to game cartridges, DVDs,
memory cards, interchangeable camera lenses, and
so on today. But the actual making of content was
never standardized in the same way. In Culture
industry reconsidered, Adorno writes:
The expression "industry" is not to be taken too
literally. It refers to the standardization of the thing
itself such as that of the Western, familiar to
every movie-goer and to the rationalization of
distribution techniques, but not strictly to the
production process it [culture industry] is industrial
more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of
industrial forms of organization even when nothing is
manufactured as in the rationalization of office
work rather than in the sense of anything really
and actually produced by technological rationality.187
So while culture industries, at their worst,
continuously put out seemingly new cultural products