Статті в журналах з теми "Songŏ (Motion picture : 1999)"

Abstract We use a discrete choice model to study the impact of tax incentives on firm location choices in situations involving heterogeneous geographic characteristics, heterogeneous firm preferences and large choice sets. We apply our model to investigate the impact of movie production incentives on filming location choices for movies produced from 1999 to 2013. We gather the characteristics of filming locations and use a machine-learning technique to define choice sets. We find production incentives can attract movies to a state, but the impact depends on the type of incentive offered, studio characteristics and inherent location geographic characteristics. Mid-sized studios respond to all forms of incentives, major studios respond only to refundable and transferable tax credits, and independent studios are not sensitive to any incentives. We fail to find strong evidence that incentives create a more permanent movie industry in a state. A counterfactual identifies the states most impacted by these policies. We supplement our discrete choice model with a simple cost-benefit analysis, which indicates that movie incentive programs are revenue-negative for states.

CONVERSATIONS WITH GALILEO: A Fictional Dialogue Based on Biographical Facts by William R. Shea. London, UK: Watkins Media, 2019. xi + 115 pages, including notes and further reading. Hardcover; $14.95. ISBN: 9781786782496. *Have you ever wanted to engage in an extended conversation with a famous person whose work and historical milieu you have studied carefully for many years? William R. Shea, one of the world's leading Galileo scholars, invites you to sit down, relax with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, to engage in a conversation with Galileo. Conversations with Galileo: A Fictional Dialogue incorporates many of Galileo's own words taken from his works or letters. This slim book will allow you to experience how such a dialogue may have transpired. *Shea, a Canadian historian, was Galileo Professor of the History of Science at the University of Padua, Italy from 2003-2012, the very university where Galileo once taught. He has authored many books about Galileo and the Scientific Revolution. The latest, co-authored with Mariano Artigas, are Galileo in Rome: The Rise and Fall of a Troublesome Genius (2003) and Galileo Observed: Science and the Politics of Belief (2006). Conversations with Galileo is part of a series of books published by Watkins Media Ltd., offering conversations with luminaries such as JFK, Oscar Wilde, Casanova, Buddha, Charles Dickens and Isaac Newton. *First, a word about the format of Conversations with Galileo: A three-page introduction by Dava Sobel, author of Longitude (1995) and Galileo's Daughter (1999), is followed by a short (21-page) biography by Shea entitled "Galileo (1564-1642): His Life in Short." Then we are offered 13 chapters dealing with a vast range of topics. Each chapter then begins with Shea posing a leading personal question. These questions cover what, I suspect, most people would want to ask Galileo: questions about censorship, the earth as a planet, scientific failures, what do you take the Bible to say, relations with the Roman Catholic Church Congregation of the Holy Office, also known as the Roman Inquisition, and the Congregation of the Index, other church officials, and, perhaps a final question: what is your claim to fame? The Galileo I remember: the rebel, the seat-of-the-pants philosopher, the "heretic," the defender of the Copernican world-picture, and the creator of a "science of motion" (appearing in the last chapter, "His Claim to Fame") are all present. *So, what more would you want to ask? To me it was surprising to see what else Shea does in fact ask. There are conversations/chapters dealing with "Family Burdens," "Wine, Women and Song," "The Burdens of Teaching," "Moonlighting," "Mind your Horoscope," "The Plague," and "On Art and Literature." This is a Galileo with a human face, with human foibles, jealousies, amorous interests, financial pressures and responsibilities, work-load issues, social conventions, concerns about the plague and social distancing, and literary interests. These are subjects which are usually hidden or absent in many accounts of Galileo's exploits. For instance, we learn of Galileo the lutenist and of his musical family: his father Vincenzo, his brother Michelangelo (a court musician to the grand duke of Bavaria in Munich). We meet his children: his two daughters, Virginia and Livia, who both entered a convent, and his son Vincenzo who had no scientific interests. We also learn about Galileo's life as a student. At seventeen, Galileo attended the University of Pisa to study medicine and "natural philosophy" (science in our parlance). He attended lectures for four and one-half years without acquiring a degree (which was quite common at the time) but did develop his mathematical interests. These are only a few of the personal details in Galileo's life which Shea explores in this book. *All in all, this is a delightful and inviting book, carefully constructed, written in an engaging style, and easy to read. Don't let the poorly designed cover keep you from picking it up. This is a good read for anyone wanting to get a look behind the scenes and meet an illustrious natural philosopher as he lived his rich and complex life. *Reviewed by Arie Leegwater, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Calvin University, Grand Rapids, MI 49456.

In this paper I explore the notion of childhood as it is re/configured in Christmas texts through the discursive frames of industrialisation and global capitalism. Through a poststructuralist analysis of three Christmas texts from the 1840s, 1940s and 1990s, I map discursive shifts in the ways that children and childhood are constructed in relation to the discourses of capitalist societies. Three texts are examined in detail: A Christmas Carol, published by Charles Dickens in 1843; the 1947 version of the film, Miracle on 34th Street; and the 1999 Walt Disney film, The Santa Clause. While these texts provide only a small sample from the thousands of texts available, their commercial success and sustained popular appeal makes them particularly significant sites of analysis. Dickens' text is widely considered 'the most often repeated and imitated secular Christmas story of all' (Belk 2005, p.18), which has itself 'become sacred Christmas literature' (Belk 2005, p. 19). The success of Miracle on 34th Street led to several remakes for television audiences, with major motion picture remakes released in 1973 and again in 1994, while The Santa Clause the role credited with launching actor Tim Allen from a successful television career into a string of Hollywood blockbuster films won the 1995 People's Choice Award (USA) for Favourite Comedy Motion Picture, and was followed by sequels in 2002 and 2006 (IMDb, 2007). When considered together, these three popular, enduring and commercially successful texts illustrate some of the ways in which cultural texts are implicated in constructing children, over time, as particular kinds of economic subjects.

Background. The current paper provides an intonation and dramaturgical analysis of the choral concerto “Witchery Songs” by a contemporary Ukrainian composer M. Shukh (1952–2018). It reveals stylistic features of the late composition, presents an argument for its affiliation to the meditative sphere enriched with new stylistics, which can be seen in the semantics of contemplation, philosophical and psychological focus (the first movement), the concept of “Light” (the second miniature) as well as composure and blissful sleep (final). Objectives. To reveal stylistic features of the choral concert “Witchery songs” in order to understand the multidimensionality of the late style of M. Shukh (2010). Methods. The methodology of the research is based on the genre, stylistic, structurally functional, intonation-dramaturgicaland semantic scientific approaches. Results. The structure of the cycle includes three miniatures created in different years (1993, 2006 and 2009). The composer combined them into a new author’s concept: the unifier was the image of the author’s contemplation, meditation on various images of O. Kryvoruchko’s poetry, which was related to his spiritual universe. The program title of the cycle “Witchery Songs” chosen by the author is general, borrowed from the dramatic imaginary sphere of the first movement. The first movement “Practising witchery on a Gray Seagull” embodies the image of a seagull appearing in different forms: as a white bird, a symbol of purity, and the grey one, which had been grief-stricken and died, leaving behind baby seagulls. The poetic text is abundant with symbols of death (“black water”, “bitter mountain”), and vice versa, with signs that symbolize hope: “clear field”, “pure wonder”, “white grasses”. At the same time, the name of the movement, its folklore bias and content also point to the image of witchery, which is embodied by M. Schukh in thematism through meditation (means of tempo and timbre dramaturgy, “dark” modal and tonal focus). The metrical organization of the movement attracts attention. If the beginning of the introduction is presented in the 4/4 time, then in the enunciation of the main theme (bar 7) the composer uses an odd meter of 11/8 with the subsequent change to 10/8, 5/8, then 3/4. The frequent change of the metric rhythm indicates the relation of the musical stylistics of this theme to the Ukrainian folk-song tradition. The second movement “Night” contains no specific symbolism of practising witchery: the semantics of the night includes rather a genre model of a nocturne with its onomatopoeia (breeze, bells, stars, moon). A beautiful pattern is perceived as an intermezzo between the dramatic text of the cycle exposition and the celestial lullaby, which elevates the earth’s feelings to the Light. The movement reveals a magical picture of nightlife. The composer embodied this contemplative image by creating light meditation. Major colour, quiet dynamics, slow tempo, and chamber-like use of musical expressiveness all contribute to the basic essence of a meditative state – calmness and relaxation. Meditative onomatopoeia interfuses the whole movement – a light breeze, lighting up the stars. The image of the bell is found in all parts: the first soprano part has a poetic text – “the wind tinkles “, the alto one has mormorando, a singing technique, the second sopranos – syllables “din, don” with sonorous singing of the last “n”. In this part the composer often applies the techniques of free development – glissando, tenuto, rhythmic variety – triples, long delays. In such a way the artist sought to “let the performers go”, creating a meditative image of night silence. In the third movement, “Angelic lullaby,” meditative semantics is multiplied, since the genre of lullaby, like meditation, has a calming effect. Thanks to its name the composer gave the song a higher, deeper meaning. Musically, the composer filled the imagery of the movement with an incredibly expressive theme, onomatopoeic techniques similar to the previous movements: imitation of a breeze, hum of birds, stream overflows. Basically, the theme of the movement unfolds with the help of a spiral-like motion technique, the sound of which contributes to the lulling of a baby to sleep. The rhythmic basis of the theme is coloured by the intonational ostinato. The metro-rhythmic structure plays a special role in the dramaturgy of the movement: the composer often changes time signature, a large number of syncopescolour the musical texture, adding depth and at the same time lightness to the texture, and making the choir sound elusively charming. Conclusions. The semantics of the work is formed by stylistic synthesis (folk elements of the musical language embedded in the poetic text of O. Kryvoruchko; sacral signs – bells, angelic lullabies and onomatopoeia), emphasized at the soundintonational level. Taking into account the program subtitle (Practising witchery), the work, at first glance, seems to be a “cognitive dissonance” in the context of spiritual themes predominance in M. Schukh’s music. However, in the original concept of the composition, the composer clarifies for the thoughtful listener his idea – “modulation” way from mythopoetic (earthy) magic to the sacredness of the spiritual type (blissful sleep). The use of folklore stylistics shows that the artist continued the national tradition of O. Koshits, L. Dychko, Ye. Stankovich and others in the choral genre. Such a genre-stylistic decision is today perceived as an actualization of the appeal to traditional folk art, through the lens of philosophicalreligious poetics of author’s thinking.

The estimation of the impact of earthquakes on buildings and mega structures in large urban areas is of extremely importance. That is why it always gets attentions from construction planners and policy makers who are concerned about construction rules. When earthquake occurs, the vibration is transferred to sites. Although the vibration intensity is at first not too strong, the motion probably becomes stronger and lasts longer under special conditions of the local site. Two famous examples for these effects occurred in Mexico City in 1985 and in Taiwan in 1999. There are a number of approaches to this problem, such as evaluations based on seismic field observations, the microtremor method, the method using the weak motion data, the method using the strong motion data, the one-dimensional wave propagation method or the three dimensional wave propagation method with simulation etc. In this paper, we will give an overview and discuss about the advantages and the disadvantages of the methods that have been commonly applied in the world. We also present the application of these methods in studies carried out in Vietnam in general and in particular, in Hanoi city. We found that the studies for Hanoi city were mainly carried out in the western areas of Hanoi and a few positions in the urban districts. In addition, the authors only gave comments about and assessments of the shear wave velocity, and classified the ground type without a detailed map of local site effects for the entire area of Hanoi. In order to obtain a full site effects evaluation for Hanoi city, future studies should focus on the application of 1D analysis for the central area of Hanoi city and combining 1D analysis with 2D or 3D to give a better picture about the impact of local site effects. This hybrid approach is necessary in order to compare and verify the data obtained by the empirical and the analytical methods. On the other hand, many problems need to be addressed, for instance, the construction of a detailed 3D geological model for Hanoi, the calculation of the dominant periods and the amplification of the local soil conditions for the urban areas.

IntroductionMusically-inclined people often speak about the soundtrack of their life, with certain songs indelibly linked to a specific moment. When hearing a particular song, it can “easily evoke a whole time and place, distant feelings and emotions, and memories of where we were, and with whom” (Lewis 135). Music has the ability to provide maps to real and imagined spaces, positioning people within a larger social environment where songs “are never just a song, but a connection, a ticket, a pass, an invitation, a node in a complex network” (Kun 3). When someone is lost in the music, they can find themselves transported somewhere else entirely without physically moving. This can be a blessing in some situations, for example, while living in a disaster zone, when almost any other time or place can seem better than the here and now. The city of Christchurch, New Zealand was hit by a succession of damaging earthquakes beginning with a magnitude 7.1 earthquake in the early hours of 4 September 2010. The magnitude 6.3 earthquake of 22 February 2011, although technically an aftershock of the September earthquake, was closer and shallower, with intense ground acceleration that caused much greater damage to the city and its people (“Scientists”). It was this February earthquake that caused the total or partial collapse of many inner city buildings, and claimed the lives of 185 people. Everybody in Christchurch lost someone or something that day: their house or job; family members, friends, or colleagues; the city as they knew it; or their normal way of life. The broken central city was quickly cordoned off behind fences, with the few entry points guarded by local and international police and armed military personnel.In the aftermath of a disaster, circumstances and personal attributes will influence how people react, think and feel about the experience. Surviving a disaster is more than not dying, “survival is to do with quality of life [and] involves progressing from the event and its aftermath, and transforming the experience” (Hodgkinson and Stewart 2). In these times of heightened stress, music can be a catalyst for sharing and expressing emotions, connecting people and communities, and helping them make sense of what has happened (Carr 38; Webb 437). This article looks at some of the ways that popular songs and musical memories helped residents of a broken city remember the past and come to terms with the present.BackgroundExisting songs can take on new significance after a catastrophic event, even without any alteration. Songs such as Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? and Prayer for New Orleans have been given new emotional layers by those who were displaced or affected by Hurricane Katrina (Cooper 265; Sullivan 15). A thirty year-old song by Randy Newman, Louisiana, 1927, became something of “a contemporary anthem, its chorus – ‘Louisiana, they’re trying to wash us away’ – bearing new relevance” (Blumenfeld 166). Contemporary popular songs have also been re-mixed or revised after catastrophic events, either by the original artist or by others. Elton John’s Candle in the Wind and Beyonce’s Halo have each been revised twice by the artist after tragedy and disaster (Doyle; McAlister), while radio stations in the United States have produced commemorative versions of popular songs to mark tragedies and their anniversaries (Beaumont-Thomas; Cantrell). The use and appreciation of music after disaster is a reminder that popular music is fluid, in that it “refuses to provide a uniform or static text” (Connell and Gibson 3), and can simultaneously carry many different meanings.Music provides a soundtrack to daily life, creating a map of meaning to the world around us, or presenting a reminder of the world as it once was. Tia DeNora explains that when people hear a song that was once heard in, and remains associated with, a particular time and place, it “provides a device for unfolding, for replaying, the temporal structure of that moment, [which] is why, for so many people, the past ‘comes alive’ to its soundtrack” (67). When a community is frequently and collectively casting their minds back to a time before a catastrophic change, a sense of community identity can be seen in the use of, and reaction to, particular songs. Music allows people to “locate themselves in different imaginary geographics at one and the same time” (Cohen 93), creating spaces for people to retreat into, small ‘audiotopias’ that are “built, imagined, and sustained through sound, noise, and music” (Kun 21). The use of musical escape holes is prevalent after disaster, as many once-familiar spaces that have changed beyond recognition or are no longer able to be physically visited, can be easily imagined or remembered through music. There is a particular type of longing expressed by those who are still at home and yet cannot return to the home they knew. Whereas nostalgia is often experienced by people far from home who wish to return or those enjoying memories of a bygone era, people after disaster often encounter a similar nostalgic feeling but with no change in time or place: a loss without leaving. Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to represent “the form of homesickness one experiences when one is still at home” (35). This sense of being unable to find solace in one’s home environment can be brought on by natural disasters such as fire, flood, earthquakes or hurricanes, or by other means like war, mining, climate change or gentrification. Solastalgia is often felt most keenly when people experience the change first-hand and then have to adjust to life in a totally changed environment. This can create “chronic distress of a solastalgic kind [that] would persist well after the acute phase of post-traumatic distress” (Albrecht 36). Just as the visible, physical effects of disaster last for years, so too do the emotional effects, but there have been many examples of how the nostalgia inherent in a shared popular music soundtrack has eased the pain of solastalgia for a community that is hurting.Pop Songs and Nostalgia in ChristchurchIn September 2011, one year after the initial earthquake, the Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) announced a collaboration with Christchurch hip hop artist, Scribe, to remake his smash hit, Not Many, for charity. Back in 2003, Not Many debuted at number five on the New Zealand music charts, where it spent twelve weeks at number one and was crowned ‘Single of the Year’ (Sweetman, On Song 164). The punchy chorus heralded Scribe as a force to be reckoned with, and created a massive imprint on New Zealand popular culture with the line: “How many dudes you know roll like this? Not many, if any” (Scribe, Not Many). Music critic, Simon Sweetman, explains how “the hook line of the chorus [is now] a conversational aside that is practically unavoidable when discussing amounts… The words ‘not many’ are now truck-and-trailered with ‘if any’. If you do not say them, you are thinking them” (On Song 167). The strong links between artist and hometown – and the fact it is an enduringly catchy song – made it ideal for a charity remake. Reworded and reworked as Not Many Cities, the chorus now asks: “How many cities you know roll like this?” to which the answer is, of course, “not many, if any” (Scribe/BNZ, Not Many Cities). The remade song entered the New Zealand music charts at number 36 and the video was widely shared through social media but not all reception was positive. Parts of the video were shot in the city’s Red Zone, the central business district that was cordoned off from public access due to safety concerns. The granting of special access outraged some residents, with letters to the editor and online commentary expressing frustration that celebrities were allowed into the Red Zone to shoot a music video while those directly affected were not allowed in to retrieve essential items from residences and business premises. However, it is not just the Red Zone that features: the video switches between Scribe travelling around the broken inner city on the back of a small truck and lingering shots of carefully selected people, businesses, and groups – all with ties to the BNZ as either clients or beneficiaries of sponsorship. In some ways, Not Many Cities comes across like just another corporate promotional video for the BNZ, albeit with more emotion and a better soundtrack than usual. But what it has bequeathed is a snapshot of the city as it was in that liminal time: a landscape featuring familiar buildings, spaces and places which, although damaged, was still a recognisable version of the city that existed before the earthquakes.Before Scribe burst onto the music scene in the early 2000s, the best-known song about Christchurch was probably Christchurch (in Cashel St. I wait), an early hit from the Exponents (Mitchell 189). Initially known as the Dance Exponents, the group formed in Christchurch in the early 1980s and remained local and national favourites thanks to a string of hits Sweetman refers to as “the question-mark songs,” such as Who Loves Who the Most?, Why Does Love Do This to Me?, and What Ever Happened to Tracey? (Best Songwriter). Despite disbanding in 1999, the group re-formed to be the headline act of ‘Band Together’—a multi-artist, outdoor music event organised for the benefit of Christchurch residents by local musician, Jason Kerrison, formerly of the band OpShop. Attended by over 140,000 people (Anderson, Band Together), this nine-hour event brought joy and distraction to a shaken and stressed populace who, at that point in time (October 2010), probably thought the worst was over.The Exponents took the stage last, and chose Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait) as their final number. Every musician involved in the gig joined them on stage and the crowd rose to their feet, singing along with gusto. A local favourite since its release in 1985, the verses may have been a bit of a mumble for some, but the chorus rang out loud and clear across the park: Christchurch, In Cashel Street I wait,Together we will be,Together, together, together, One day, one day, one day,One day, one day, one daaaaaay! (Exponents, “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait)”; lyrics written as sung)At that moment, forming an impromptu community choir of over 100,000 people, the audience was filled with hope and faith that those words would come true. Life would go on and people would gather together in Cashel Street and wait for normality to return, one day. Later the following year, the opening of the Re:Start container mall added an extra layer of poignancy to the song lyrics. Denied access to most of the city’s CBD, that one small part of Cashel Street now populated with colourful shipping containers was almost the only place in central Christchurch where people could wait. There are many music videos that capture the central city of Christchurch as it was in decades past. There are some local classics, like The Bats’ Block of Wood and Claudine; The Shallows’ Suzanne Said; Moana and the Moahunters’ Rebel in Me; and All Fall Down’s Black Gratten, which were all filmed in the 1980s or early 1990s (Goodsort, Re-Live and More Music). These videos provide many flashback moments to the city as it was twenty or thirty years ago. However, one post-earthquake release became an accidental musical time capsule. The song, Space and Place, was released in February 2013, but both song and video had been recorded not long before the earthquakes occurred. The song was inspired by the feelings experienced when returning home after a long absence, and celebrates the importance of the home town as “a place that knows you as well as you know it” (Anderson, Letter). The chorus features the line, “streets of common ground, I remember, I remember” (Franklin, Mayes, and Roberts, Space and Place), but it is the video, showcasing many of the Christchurch places and spaces only recently lost to the earthquakes, that tugs at people’s heartstrings. The video for Space and Place sweeps through the central city at night, with key heritage buildings like the Christ Church Cathedral, and the Catholic Basilica lit up against the night sky (both are still damaged and inaccessible). Producer and engineer, Rob Mayes, describes the video as “a love letter to something we all lost [with] the song and its lyrics [becoming] even more potent, poignant, and unexpectedly prescient post quake” (“Songs in the Key”). The Arts Centre features prominently in the footage, including the back alleys and archways that hosted all manner of night-time activities – sanctioned or otherwise – as well as many people’s favourite hangout, the Dux de Lux (the Dux). Operating from the corner of the Arts Centre site since the 1970s, the Dux has been described as “the city’s common room” and “Christchurch’s beating heart” by musicians mourning its loss (Anderson, Musicians). While the repair and restoration of some parts of the Arts Centre is currently well advanced, the Student Union building that once housed this inner-city social institution is not slated for reopening until 2019 (“Rebuild and Restore”), and whether the Dux will be welcomed back remains to be seen. Empty Spaces, Missing PlacesA Facebook group, ‘Save Our Dux,’ was created in early March 2011, and quickly filled with messages and memories from around the world. People wandered down memory lane together as they reminisced about their favourite gigs and memorable occasions, like the ‘Big Snow’ of 1992 when the Dux served up mulled wine and looked more like a ski chalet. Memories were shared about the time when the music video for the Dance Exponents’ song, Victoria, was filmed at the Dux and the Art Deco-style apartment building across the street. The reminiscing continued, establishing and strengthening connections, with music providing a stepping stone to shared experience and a sense of community. Physically restricted from visiting a favourite social space, people were converging in virtual hangouts to relive moments and remember places now cut off by the passing of time, the falling of bricks, and the rise of barrier fences.While waiting to find out whether the original Dux site can be re-occupied, the business owners opened new venues that housed different parts of the Dux business (live music, vegetarian food, and the bars/brewery). Although the fit-out of the restaurant and bars capture a sense of the history and charm that people associate with the Dux brand, the empty wasteland and building sites that surround the new Dux Central quickly destroy any illusion of permanence or familiarity. Now that most of the quake-damaged buildings have been demolished, the freshly-scarred earth of the central city is like a child’s gap-toothed smile. Wandering around the city and forgetting what used to occupy an empty space, wanting to visit a shop or bar before remembering it is no longer there, being at the Dux but not at the Dux – these are the kind of things that contributed to a feeling that local music writer, Vicki Anderson, describes as “lost city syndrome” (“Lost City”). Although initially worried she might be alone in mourning places lost, other residents have shared similar experiences. In an online comment on the article, one local resident explained how there are two different cities fighting for dominance in their head: “the new keeps trying to overlay the old [but] when I’m not looking at pictures, or in seeing it as it is, it’s the old city that pushes its way to the front” (Juniper). Others expressed relief that they were not the only ones feeling strangely homesick in their own town, homesick for a place they never left but that had somehow left them.There are a variety of methods available to fill the gaps in both memories and cityscape. The Human Interface Technology Laboratory New Zealand (HITLab), produced a technological solution: interactive augmented reality software called CityViewAR, using GPS data and 3D models to show parts of the city as they were prior to the earthquakes (“CityViewAR”). However, not everybody needed computerised help to remember buildings and other details. Many people found that, just by listening to a certain song or remembering particular gigs, it was not just an image of a building that appeared but a multi-sensory event complete with sound, movement, smell, and emotion. In online spaces like the Save Our Dux group, memories of favourite bands and songs, crowded gigs, old friends, good times, great food, and long nights were shared and discussed, embroidering a rich and colourful tapestry about a favourite part of Christchurch’s social scene. ConclusionMusic is strongly interwoven with memory, and can recreate a particular moment in time and place through the associations carried in lyrics, melody, and imagery. Songs can spark vivid memories of what was happening – when, where, and with whom. A song shared is a connection made: between people; between moments; between good times and bad; between the past and the present. Music provides a soundtrack to people’s lives, and during times of stress it can also provide many benefits. The lyrics and video imagery of songs made in years gone by have been shown to take on new significance and meaning after disaster, offering snapshots of times, people and places that are no longer with us. Even without relying on the accompanying imagery of a video, music has the ability to recreate spaces or relocate the listener somewhere other than the physical location they currently occupy. This small act of musical magic can provide a great deal of comfort when suffering solastalgia, the feeling of homesickness one experiences when the familiar landscapes of home suddenly change or disappear, when one has not left home but that home has nonetheless gone from sight. The earthquakes (and the demolition crews that followed) have created a lot of empty land in Christchurch but the sound of popular music has filled many gaps – not just on the ground, but also in the hearts and lives of the city’s residents. ReferencesAlbrecht, Glenn. “Solastalgia.” Alternatives Journal 32.4/5 (2006): 34-36.Anderson, Vicki. “A Love Letter to Christchurch.” Stuff 22 Feb. 2013. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/christchurch-life/art-and-stage/christchurch-music/8335491/A-love-letter-to-Christchurch>.———. “Band Together.” Supplemental. The Press. 25 Oct. 2010: 1. ———. “Lost City Syndrome.” Stuff 19 Mar. 2012. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/blogs/rock-and-roll-mother/6600468/Lost-city-syndrome>.———. “Musicians Sing Praises in Call for ‘Vital Common Room’ to Reopen.” The Press 7 Jun. 2011: A8. Beaumont-Thomas, Ben. “Exploring Musical Responses to 9/11.” Guardian 9 Sep. 2011. <https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2011/sep/09/musical-responses-9-11>. Blumenfeld, Larry. “Since the Flood: Scenes from the Fight for New Orleans Jazz Culture.” Pop When the World Falls Apart. Ed. Eric Weisbard. Durham: Duke UP, 2012. 145-175.Cantrell, Rebecca. “These Emotional Musical Tributes Are Still Powerful 20 Years after Oklahoma City Bombing.” KFOR 18 Apr. 2015. <http://kfor.com/2015/04/18/these-emotional-musical-tributes-are-still-powerful-20-years-after-oklahoma-city-bombing/>.Carr, Revell. ““We Never Will Forget”: Disaster in American Folksong from the Nineteenth Century to September 11, 2011.” Voices 30.3/4 (2004): 36-41. “CityViewAR.” HITLab NZ, ca. 2011. <http://www.hitlabnz.org/index.php/products/cityviewar>. Cohen, Sara. Decline, Renewal and the City in Popular Music Culture: Beyond the Beatles. Hampshire: Ashgate, 2007. Connell, John, and Chris Gibson. Soundtracks: Popular Music, Identity and Place. London: Routledge, 2003.Cooper, B. Lee. “Right Place, Wrong Time: Discography of a Disaster.” Popular Music and Society 31.2 (2008): 263-4. DeNora, Tia. Music in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Doyle, Jack. “Candle in the Wind, 1973 & 1997.” Pop History Dig 26 Apr. 2008. <http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/candle-in-the-wind1973-1997/>. Goodsort, Paul. “More Music Videos Set in Pre-Quake(s) Christchurch.” Mostly within Human Hearing Range. 3 Dec. 2011. <http://humanhearingrange.blogspot.co.nz/2011/12/more-music-videos-set-in-pre-quakes.html>.———. “Re-Live the ‘Old’ Christchurch in Music Videos.” Mostly within Human Hearing Range. 7 Nov. 2011. <http://humanhearingrange.blogspot.co.nz/2011/11/re-live-old-christchurch-in-music.html>. Hodgkinson, Peter, and Michael Stewart. Coping with Catastrophe: A Handbook of Disaster Management. London: Routledge, 1991. Juniper. “Lost City Syndrome.” Comment. Stuff 19 Mar. 2012. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/opinion/blogs/rock-and-roll-mother/6600468/Lost-city-syndrome>.Kun, Josh. Audiotopia. Berkeley: U of California P, 2005. Lewis, George H. “Who Do You Love? The Dimensions of Musical Taste.” Popular Music and Communication. Ed. James Lull. London: Sage, 1992. 134-151. Mayes, Rob. “Songs in the Key-Space and Place.” Failsafe Records. Mar. 2013. <http://www.failsaferecords.com/>.McAlister, Elizabeth. “Soundscapes of Disaster and Humanitarianism.” Small Axe 16.3 (2012): 22-38. Mitchell, Tony. “Flat City Sounds Redux: A Musical ‘Countercartography’ of Christchurch.” Home, Land and Sea: Situating Music in Aotearoa New Zealand. Eds. Glenda Keam and Tony Mitchell. Auckland: Pearson, 2011. 176-194.“Rebuild and Restore.” Arts Centre, ca. 2016. <http://www.artscentre.org.nz/rebuild---restore.html>.“Scientists Find Rare Mix of Factors Exacerbated the Christchurch Quake.” GNS [Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences Limited] Science 16 Mar. 2011. <http://www.gns.cri.nz/Home/News-and-Events/Media-Releases/Multiple-factors>. Sullivan, Jack. “In New Orleans, Did the Music Die?” Chronicle of Higher Education 53.3 (2006): 14-15. Sweetman, Simon. “New Zealand’s Best Songwriter.” Stuff 18 Feb. 2011. <http://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/blogs/blog-on-the-tracks/4672532/New-Zealands-best-songwriter>.———. On Song. Auckland: Penguin, 2012.Webb, Gary. “The Popular Culture of Disaster: Exploring a New Dimension of Disaster Research.” Handbook of Disaster Research. Eds. Havidan Rodriguez, Enrico Quarantelli and Russell Dynes. New York: Springer, 2006. 430-440. MusicAll Fall Down. “Black Gratten.” Wallpaper Coat [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987.Bats. “Block of Wood” [single]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1987. ———. “Claudine.” And Here’s Music for the Fireside [EP]. New Zealand: Flying Nun, 1985. Beyonce. “Halo.” I Am Sacha Fierce. USA: Columbia, 2008.Charlie Miller. “Prayer for New Orleans.” Our New Orleans. USA: Nonesuch, 2005. (Dance) Exponents. “Christchurch (in Cashel St. I Wait).” Expectations. New Zealand: Mushroom Records, 1985.———. “Victoria.” Prayers Be Answered. New Zealand: Mushroom, 1982. ———. “What Ever Happened to Tracy?” Something Beginning with C. New Zealand: PolyGram, 1992.———. “Who Loves Who the Most?” Something Beginning with C. New Zealand: PolyGram, 1992.———. “Why Does Love Do This to Me?” Something Beginning with C. New Zealand: PolyGram, 1992.Elton John. “Candle in the Wind.” Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. United Kingdom: MCA, 1973.Franklin, Leigh, Rob Mayes, and Mark Roberts. “Space and Place.” Songs in the Key. New Zealand: Failsafe, 2013. Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. “Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans.” New Orleans Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. USA: Giants of Jazz, 1983 (originally recorded 1947). Moana and the Moahunters. “Rebel in Me.” Tahi. New Zealand: Southside, 1993.Randy Newman. “Louisiana 1927.” Good Old Boys. USA: Reprise, 1974.Scribe. “Not Many.” The Crusader. New Zealand: Dirty Records/Festival Mushroom, 2003.Scribe/BNZ. “Not Many Cities.” [charity single]. New Zealand, 2011. The Shallows. “Suzanne Said.” [single]. New Zealand: self-released, 1985.

In a 2003 Rolling Stone review of David Bowie’s 1972 concept album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, one critic looks back and argues that “[the creation of] Ziggy was a shrewd move because it presented Bowie, the fledgling artiste, as an established rock star.” Bowie’s shrewdness, the author muses, lies in the fact that he created in Ziggy “rock’s first completely prepackaged persona,” and inscribed it over his own. Whether or not Ziggy was indeed the first such persona (one asks oneself if all celebrities are not, to a degree, prepackaged personae), Bowie’s self-reflexivity in attaining this level of celebrity mystique was nothing short of ingenious. In inventing Ziggy Stardust, the ultimate ready-made rock and roll star, and becoming ‘him’ on stage and vinyl, Bowie conflated his own blossoming celebrity status with larger-than-life stardom. Ironically, Bowie achieved this end not by aligning himself with a figure who seemed representative of mainstream ideology, but by aligning himself with one who could be the poster ‘boy’ for the margin. The album does, after all, feature Bowie as Ziggy the alien rock star; on tour Bowie even dressed the part. Ziggy is, to borrow William Hope Hodgson’s term, “abhuman,” or not quite human: part man, part alien (Hurley 5). More precisely, as his flamboyant costumes and song lyrics suggest, Ziggy is not entirely male or female, straight or gay, earthling or extra-terrestrial. The only thing that is clearly identifiable about Ziggy is that ‘he’ is a star. I use quotation marks around masculine pronouns because Ziggy is David Bowie in drag; he gestures towards the instability of gender categories. Accordingly, Ziggy embodies a citation of regulatory norms that can actually disrupt rather than affirm these norms (Butler 174). Indeed, my choice of ‘he’ over ‘she’ is arbitrary at best, and at worst it is the effect of the social meanings derived from sexual difference. But Bowie disrupts more than masculinity or femininity through Ziggy; his performance of celebrity points to persona production as much as his drag gestures towards gender’s constructedness. The question that this short article seeks to answer is how Bowie/Ziggy can be read as a mode of celebrity correlated to self-consciousness about its own production, and how such a reading might rethink discourses of the star that associate the augmentation of celebrity to the integrity of its facilitating structures. Ziggy was born into the ‘real’ world with a hyperreal fan base; he is a fictional character with fictional fans. Ultimately, just as Jean Baudrillard argues that the map of the real precedes its territory (1), Ziggy’s imaginary fans became an actual audience. So, with ‘real’ fans to adore and emulate him, Ziggy brought to centre stage a host of ambiguities and categorical transgressions typically confined to the margin. This shifting of the marginal seems to reveal that Ziggy Stardust – and, by extension, David Bowie – carried a certain degree of ideological power over his (their) audience. The Ziggy phenomenon thus complicates Francesco Alberoni’s theory that celebrities come into being when the needs of a given community to discuss social attitudes and behaviour are not being met. Alberoni suggests that although these needs can be negotiated through the celebrity image, the celebrity himself has a relatively small amount of institutional power: he is merely a symptom, a reflection, of what is already needed by the public. Yet as a fabricated persona that precedes his audience, Ziggy does more than reflect unmet audience needs to transgress; he embodies a prefabrication of these needs intended for commodification and mass cultural consumption. Of course, as I have mentioned, one could argue that all celebrity functions in this way. The difference between Ziggy Stardust and most celebrities is that, as a performance of celebrity, he reveals the machinery behind the prefabrication of what an audience longs for or needs. This is of course not to confuse a Bulterian performativity with performance; Bowie’s album and concerts performed Ziggy and were performative of celebrity (again, Butler’s discussion of drag provides a helpful analogy). And because behind Ziggy there was always David Bowie, already a nascent rock star, and because Bowie’s growing celebrity was symbiotically bound to his creation, Ziggy can be said to have been a Bowie parody. Richard DeCordova suggests that the escalation of celebrity status depends the perceived integrity of the system that facilitates that celebrity (ie. film, music or television industries) (28). But Bowie’s performance of Ziggy calls the integrity of the entire constellation of stardom into question in two fundamental ways. First, Ziggy’s celebrity is dependent on transgressing cultural norms. It may seem counterintuitive to the augmentation of celebrity for David Bowie to portray a character possessing the numerous marginal traits Ziggy Stardust does. Yet critics tend to agree that it is precisely these eccentricities that have popularized Ziggy, and by extension, Bowie. Richard Grossinger, for example, uses both Ziggy’s sexual ambiguity and status as an alien to maintain the notion that celebrity provides a forum through the collective audience might fulfill its need to renegotiate what constitutes acceptable social attitudes and behaviours. Grossinger notes that flying saucer “addicts” often suffer from gender confusion that manifests in their descriptions of “encounters” with aliens. That is, the alien becomes an androgynous, transsexual reflection of the individual who perceives/imagines it (55). In the case of the gender-confused flying saucer addict, “the spaceman is [their] saviour from traditional male-female roles because he is neither male nor female” (56). In this sense, the spaceman, not unlike a Weberian charismatic leader (see Williams), reflects the unmet needs of those who view/construct him; he transgresses Earth’s genetic and social boundaries in ways that Earthlings cannot. Grossinger argues that David Bowie’s portrayal of Ziggy Stardust – bisexual, androgynous space man/woman – makes him one such “saviour” for his audience in that he similarly reflects their latent desires to cross these boundaries. Several popular images of Bowie in the media seem to avow this reading of his celebrity status as something redeeming for audiences by virtue of its link to both gender ambiguity and alienness. Yet Grossinger forgets that Ziggy Stardust is not merely the apparition of an unstable science-fiction fanatic, but a tangible figure whose ambiguous traits are more than the fruits of a collective imagination. Ziggy’s physical presence makes Grossinger’s link between alienness and popularity suspect. The second way that Ziggy calls the integrity of celebrity into question, then, is through his self-reflexive gestures to his own constructedness. For example, the album’s juxtaposition of songs about an alien drag queen rocker who will ‘blow the minds’ of Earth’s children, with “Star” – about a young man’s decision to transform himself into a rock and roll celebrity persona – seems to subtly imply Bowie’s self-consciousness about his own construction of such a persona to achieve fame. Moreover, of course, Just as Ziggy’s songs are written narratives, so Ziggy himself is a parodic celebrity, a creation of David Bowie’s. Accordingly, the notion that Ziggy the starman can reflect the needs of his audience to transgress social and sexual boundaries is equally artificial. The duality of the alien figure affirms my distrust of Ziggy’s celebrity as a fulfillment of his audience’s unmet needs. In fact, there is an inherent paradox to the argument that the alien figure functions in this way. Grossinger astutely identifies the ‘alien as marginal as unexplored aspect of self allegory.’ Yet the allegorical connotations of alienness can also detach the audience from the celebrity/leader. Grossinger’s allegory is thus always undercut by another metaphor: the alien as the ultimately foreign and unfamiliar. In this sense, Ziggy might reflect not his audience’s desires, but rather the impossibility of familiarity with his audience: celebrity itself as alien and elusive. It is impossible, after all, to appease each articulation of collective desire, if such a concept even has a potential reality. To further complicate matters, Ziggy’s alienness might connote Bowie’s distance from the alien, a mechanism to vouchsafe Bowie the celebrity from any self-conscious critique Ziggy might embody. Making Ziggy an alien thus sets up the illusion of a distinction between Ziggy the constructed celebrity and Bowie the ‘real’ one. In this way, Bowie manages to both expose and disguise the nature of celebrity construction in terms of audience needs. Because Ziggy is one star inscribed onto another, his pre-packaged celebrity is pointedly parodic, and targets not only the work of the culture industry, but David Bowie as a manifestation of the culture industry. This parody renders unto Bowie a problematic duplicity; he becomes both culture industry, creator of Ziggy Stardust – who is self-reflexive of the creation of his “Bowie” level of stardom – as well as product of the culture industry – Ziggy Stardust and David Bowie the celebrities. Ziggy Stardust, then, embodies not only the overlapping of man and woman, male and female, or human and alien, but also of production and product, and implicates Bowie as manifestation of the culture industry in the fabrication of audience need. Bowie has used Ziggy Stardust to perpetuate and authenticate his own fame even as he uses him to reveal the manipulation of audience desire that makes this possible. In this light, Bowie’s celebrity depends to some extent on his paradoxical disillusionment with and perpetuation of the culture industry’s powers of manipulation. Thus, David Bowie’s creation of Ziggy Stardust achieves a level of shrewdness yet to be tapped into by rock journalists or celebrity theorists: the augmentation of fame through parodying celebrity’s ideological manipulation of the audience. Although Bowie provides a particularly jarring example of this mode of achieving celebrity, surely it is not unique to Ziggy Stardust (think Marilyn Manson, and perhaps even Dame Edna). Such explicitly parodic celebrities implicate themselves in the culture industry’s deception. The question that remains concerns the extent to which the popularity derived from this implication reflects a paradoxical mode of celebrity-weary fandom. References Alberoni, Francesco. “The Powerless Elite: Theory and Sociological Research on the Phenomenon of the Stars.” Sociology of Mass Communications. Ed. Denis McQuail. London: Penguin, 1972. Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. Bowie, David. The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Rykodisc, RCD 10134, 1972. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1998. Garber, Marjory. “Bisexuality and Celebrity.” The Seductions of Biography. Eds. Rhiel M. and D. Suchoff. New York: Routledge, 1996. Grossinger, Richard. Martian Homecoming at the All-American Revival Church. Plainfield: North Atlantic Books, 1974. Horkheimer, Max and Theodore Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. S. During. London: Routledge, 1993. Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism and Degeneration at the Fin-de-Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. King, Barry. “Articulating Stardom.” Screen 26 (1985): 45-8. Laing, Dave and Simon Frith. “Bowie Zowie: Two Views of the Glitter Prince of Rock.” Let It Rock June 1973: n. pag. 27 Sept. 2004 http://www.5years.com/bowiezowie.htm>. Marshall, David P. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Rev. of The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. Rolling Stone Feb. 2003: n. pag. 27 Sept. 2004 www.rollingstone.com/reviews/cd/review.asp?aid=41562&cf=331>. Ziggy Stardust: The Motion Picture. Dir. D.A. Pennebaker. RCA, 1983. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Rintoul, Suzanne. "Loving the Alien: Ziggy Stardust and Self-Conscious Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/03-rintoul.php>. APA Style Rintoul, S.. (Nov. 2004) "Loving the Alien: Ziggy Stardust and Self-Conscious Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/03-rintoul.php>.

Historically the impact of the printing press on Western culture is a truism. Print gave rise to the mass reproduction and circulation of information with wide reaching consequences in all fields: political, social, and economic. An aspect that this paper wishes to focus on is that this moment also saw the birth (and necessity) of copyright legislation, to administer and protect this new found ability to package and disseminate text. The term copyright itself, used freely in debates surrounding contemporary topics such as iTunes, DVD piracy, and file-sharing, is not only semantically anachronistic but, as will be shown, is an anachronistic problem. The history that it carries, through almost three hundred years, underscores the difficulties at the heart of copyright in the contemporary scene. Indeed the reliance on copyright in these debates creates an argument based on circular definitions relating to only the statutory conception of cultural rights. No avenue is really left to imagine a space outside its jurisdiction. This paper asserts that notions of the “culture industry” (as opposed to some other conception of culture) are also inherently connected to the some three hundred years of copyright legislation. Our conceptions of the author and of intellectual pursuits as property can also be traced within this relatively small period. As clarified by Lord Chief Baron Pollock in the English courts in 1854, “copyright is altogether an artificial right” that does not apply at common law and relies wholly on statute (Jeffreys v Boosey). Foucault (124-42) highlights, in his attack on Romantic notions of the author-genius-God, that the author-function is expressed primarily as a legal term, through the legal concepts of censorship and copyright. Copyright, then, pays little attention to non-economic interests of the author and is used primarily to further economic interests. The corporate nature of the culture industry at present amounts to the successful application of copyright legislation in the past. This paper suggests that we look at our conception of literary and artistic work as separate from copyright’s own definitions of intellectual property and the commercialisation of culture. From Hogarth to File-Sharing The case of ‘DVD Jon’ is instructive. In 1999, Jon Lech Johansen, a Norwegian programmer, drew the ire of Hollywood by breaking the encryption code for DVDs (in a program called DeCSS). More recently, he has devised a program to circumvent the anti-piracy system for Apple’s iTunes music download service. With this program, called PyMusique, users still have to pay for the songs, but once these are paid for, users can use the songs on all operating systems and with no limits on copying, transfers or burning. Johansen, who publishes his wares on his blog entitled So Sue Me, was in fact sued in 1999 by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) for copyright infringement. He argued that he created DeCSS as part of developing a DVD player for his Linux operating system, and that copying DVD movies was an ancillary function of the program for which he could not be held responsible. He was acquitted by an Oslo district court in early 2003 and again by an appeals court later that year. During this time many people on the internet found novel ways to publish the DeCSS code so as to avoid prosecution, including many different code encryptions incorporated into jpeg images (including the trademarked DVD logo, owned by DVD LLC) and mpeg movies, as an online MUD game scenario, and even produced in the form of a haiku (“42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS”). The ability to publish the code in a format not readily prosecutable owes less to encryption and clandestine messages than it does to anachronistic laws regarding the wholly legal right to original formats. Prior to 1709, copyright or licensing related to the book publishing industry where the work as formatted, pressed and disseminated was more important to protect than the text itself or the concept of the author as the writer of the text. Even today different copyrights may be held over the different formatting of the same text. The ability for hackers to attack the copyright legislation through its inherent anachronism is more than smart lawyering or a neat joke. These attacks, based on file sharing and the morphing fluid forms of information (rather than contained text, printed, broadcast, or expressed through form in general), amount to a real breach in copyright’s capability to administer and protect information. That the corporations are so excited and scared of these new technologies of dissemination should come as no surprise. It should also not be seen, as some commentators wish to, as a completely new approach to the dissemination of culture. If copyright was originally intended to protect the rights of the publisher, the passing of the Act of Anne in 1709 introduced two new concepts – an author being the owner of copyright, and the principle of a fixed term of protection for published works. In 1734, William Hogarth, wanting to ensure profits would flow from his widely disseminated prints (which attracted many pirate copies), fought to have these protections extended to visual works. What is notable about all this is that in 1734 the concept of copyright both in literary and artistic works applied only to published or reproduced works. It would be over one hundred years later, in the Romantic period, that a broader protection to all artworks would be available (for example, paintings, sculpture, etc). Born primarily out of guild systems, the socio-political aspect of protection, although with a passing nod to the author, was primarily a commercial concern. These days the statute has muddied its primary purpose; commercial interest is conflated and confused with the moral rights of the author (which, it might be added, although first asserted in the International Berne Convention of 1886 were only ratified in Australia in December 2000). For instance, in a case such as Sony Entertainment (Australia) Ltd v Smith (2005), both parties in fact want the protection of copyright. On one day the DJ in question (Pee Wee Ferris) might be advertising himself through his DJ name as an appropriative, sampling artist-author, while at the same time, we might assume, wishing to protect his own rights as a recording artist. Alternatively, the authors of the various DeCSS code works want both the free flow of information which then results in a possible free flow of media content. Naturally, this does not sit well with the current lords of copyright: the corporations. The new open-source author works contrary to all copyright. Freed Slaves The model of the open source author is not without precedent. Historically, prior to copyright and the culture industry, this approach to authorship was the norm. The Roman poet Martial, known for his wit and gifts of poetry, wrote I commend to you, Quintianus, my little books – if I can call them mine when your poet recites them: if they complain of their harsh servitude, you should come forward as their champion and give your guarantees; and when he calls himself their master you should say they are mine and have been granted their freedom. If you shout this out three or four times, you will make their kidnapper (plagiario) feel ashamed of himself. Here of course the cultural producer is a landed aristocrat (a situation common to early Western poets such as Chaucer, Spencer and More). The poem, or work, exists in the economy of the gift. The author-function here is also not the same as in modern times but was based on the advantages of reputation and celebrity within the Roman court. Similarly other texts such as stories, songs and music were circulated, prior to print, in a primarily oral economy. Later, with the rise of the professional guild system in late medieval times, the patronage system did indeed pay artists, sometimes royal sums. However, this bursary was not so much for the work than for upkeep as members of the household holding a particular skill. The commercial aspect of the author as owner only became fully realised with the rise of the middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth century and led to the global adoption of the copyright regime as the culture industry’s sanction. Added to this, the author is now overwhelmingly a corporation, not an individual, which has expanded the utilisation of these statutes for commercial advantage to, perhaps, an unforeseen degree. To understand the file-sharing period, which we are now entering at full speed, we cannot be confused by notions found in the copyright acts; definitions based on copyright cannot adequately express a culture without commercial concerns. Perhaps the discussion needs to return to concepts that predate copyright, before the author-function (as suggested by Foucault) and before the notion of intellectual property. That we have returned to a gift economy for cultural products is easily understood in the context of file-sharing. But what of the author? Here the figure of the hacker suggests a movement towards such an archaic model where the author’s remuneration comes in the form of celebrity, or a reputation as an exciting innovator. Another model, which is perhaps more likely, is an understanding that certain material disseminated will be sold and administered under copyright for profit and that the excess will be quickly and efficiently disseminated with no profit and with no overall duration of protection. Such an amalgamated approach is exemplified by Radiohead’s Kid A album, which, although available for free downloads, was still profitable because the (anachronistic) printed version, with its cover and artwork, still sold by the millions. Perhaps cultural works, the slaves of the author-corporation, should be granted their freedom: freedom from servitude to a commercial master, freedom to be re-told rather than re-sold, with due attribution to the author the only payment. This is a Utopian idea perhaps, but no less a fantasy than the idea that the laws of copyright, born of the printing press, can evolve to match the economy today that they purport to control. When thinking about ownership and authorship today, it must be recalled that copyright itself has a history of useful fictions. References Michel Foucault; “What Is an Author?” Twentieth-Century Literary Theory. Eds. Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller. Albany: State UP of New York, 1987. 124-42. “42 Ways to Distribute DeCSS.” 5 Jun. 2005 http://decss.zoy.org/>. Jeffreys v Boosey, 1854. Johansen, Jon Lech. So Sue Me. 5 Jun. 2005 http://www.nanocrew.net/blog/>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Phillips, Dougal, and Oliver Watts. "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>. APA Style Phillips, D., and O. Watts. (Jun. 2005) "Copyright, Print and Authorship in the Culture Industry," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/06-phillipswatts.php>.

From elephants to ABBA fans, silicon to hormone, the following discussion uses a new research method to look at printed text, motion pictures and a teenage rebel icon. If by ‘print’ we mean a mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium, then printing has been with us since before microdot security prints were painted onto cars, before voice prints, laser prints, network servers, record pressings, motion picture prints, photo prints, colour woodblock prints, before books, textile prints, and footprints. If we accept that higher mammals such as elephants have a learnt culture, then it is possible to extend a definition of printing beyond Homo sapiens. Poole reports that elephants mechanically trumpet reproductions of human car horns into the air surrounding their society. If nothing else, this cross-species, cross-cultural reproduction, this ‘ability to mimic’ is ‘another sign of their intelligence’. Observation of child development suggests that the first significant meaningful ‘impression’ made on the human mind is that of the face of the child’s nurturer – usually its mother. The baby’s mind forms an ‘impression’, a mental print, a reproducible memory data set, of the nurturer’s face, voice, smell, touch, etc. That face is itself a cultural construct: hair style, makeup, piercings, tattoos, ornaments, nutrition-influenced skin and smell, perfume, temperature and voice. A mentally reproducible pattern of a unique face is formed in the mind, and we use that pattern to distinguish ‘familiar and strange’ in our expanding social orbit. The social relations of patterned memory – of imprinting – determine the extent to which we explore our world (armed with research aids such as text print) or whether we turn to violence or self-harm (Bretherton). While our cultural artifacts (such as vellum maps or networked voice message servers) bravely extend our significant patterns into the social world and the traversed environment, it is useful to remember that such artifacts, including print, are themselves understood by our original pattern-reproduction and impression system – the human mind, developed in childhood. The ‘print’ is brought to mind differently in different discourses. For a reader, a ‘print’ is a book, a memo or a broadsheet, whether it is the Indian Buddhist Sanskrit texts ordered to be printed in 593 AD by the Chinese emperor Sui Wen-ti (Silk Road) or the US Defense Department memo authorizing lower ranks to torture the prisoners taken by the Bush administration (Sanchez, cited in ABC). Other fields see prints differently. For a musician, a ‘print’ may be the sheet music which spread classical and popular music around the world; it may be a ‘record’ (as in a ‘recording’ session), where sound is impressed to wax, vinyl, charged silicon particles, or the alloys (Smith, “Elpida”) of an mp3 file. For the fine artist, a ‘print’ may be any mechanically reproduced two-dimensional (or embossed) impression of a significant image in media from paper to metal, textile to ceramics. ‘Print’ embraces the Japanese Ukiyo-e colour prints of Utamaro, the company logos that wink from credit card holographs, the early photographs of Talbot, and the textured patterns printed into neolithic ceramics. Computer hardware engineers print computational circuits. Homicide detectives investigate both sweaty finger prints and the repeated, mechanical gaits of suspects, which are imprinted into the earthy medium of a crime scene. For film makers, the ‘print’ may refer to a photochemical polyester reproduction of a motion picture artifact (the reel of ‘celluloid’), or a DVD laser disc impression of the same film. Textualist discourse has borrowed the word ‘print’ to mean ‘text’, so ‘print’ may also refer to the text elements within the vision track of a motion picture: the film’s opening titles, or texts photographed inside the motion picture story such as the sword-cut ‘Z’ in Zorro (Niblo). Before the invention of writing, the main mechanically reproduced impression of a cultural symbol in a medium was the humble footprint in the sand. The footprints of tribes – and neighbouring animals – cut tracks in the vegetation and the soil. Printed tracks led towards food, water, shelter, enemies and friends. Having learnt to pattern certain faces into their mental world, children grew older and were educated in the footprints of family and clan, enemies and food. The continuous impression of significant foot traffic in the medium of the earth produced the lines between significant nodes of prewriting and pre-wheeled cultures. These tracks were married to audio tracks, such as the song lines of the Australian Aborigines, or the ballads of tramping culture everywhere. A typical tramping song has the line, ‘There’s a track winding back to an old-fashion shack along the road to Gundagai,’ (O’Hagan), although this colonial-style song was actually written for radio and became an international hit on the airwaves, rather than the tramping trails. The printed tracks impressed by these cultural flows are highly contested and diverse, and their foot prints are woven into our very language. The names for printed tracks have entered our shared memory from the intersection of many cultures: ‘Track’ is a Germanic word entering English usage comparatively late (1470) and now used mainly in audio visual cultural reproduction, as in ‘soundtrack’. ‘Trek’ is a Dutch word for ‘track’ now used mainly by ecotourists and science fiction fans. ‘Learn’ is a Proto-Indo-European word: the verb ‘learn’ originally meant ‘to find a track’ back in the days when ‘learn’ had a noun form which meant ‘the sole of the foot’. ‘Tract’ and ‘trace’ are Latin words entering English print usage before 1374 and now used mainly in religious, and electronic surveillance, cultural reproduction. ‘Trench’ in 1386 was a French path cut through a forest. ‘Sagacity’ in English print in 1548 was originally the ability to track or hunt, in Proto-Indo-European cultures. ‘Career’ (in English before 1534) was the print made by chariots in ancient Rome. ‘Sleuth’ (1200) was a Norse noun for a track. ‘Investigation’ (1436) was Latin for studying a footprint (Harper). The arrival of symbolic writing scratched on caves, hearth stones, and trees (the original meaning of ‘book’ is tree), brought extremely limited text education close to home. Then, with baked clay tablets, incised boards, slate, bamboo, tortoise shell, cast metal, bark cloth, textiles, vellum, and – later – paper, a portability came to text that allowed any culture to venture away from known ‘foot’ paths with a reduction in the risk of becoming lost and perishing. So began the world of maps, memos, bills of sale, philosophic treatises and epic mythologies. Some of this was printed, such as the mechanical reproduction of coins, but the fine handwriting required of long, extended, portable texts could not be printed until the invention of paper in China about 2000 years ago. Compared to lithic architecture and genes, portable text is a fragile medium, and little survives from the millennia of its innovators. The printing of large non-text designs onto bark-paper and textiles began in neolithic times, but Sui Wen-ti’s imperial memo of 593 AD gives us the earliest written date for printed books, although we can assume they had been published for many years previously. The printed book was a combination of Indian philosophic thought, wood carving, ink chemistry and Chinese paper. The earliest surviving fragment of paper-print technology is ‘Mantras of the Dharani Sutra’, a Buddhist scripture written in the Sanskrit language of the Indian subcontinent, unearthed at an early Tang Dynasty site in Xian, China – making the fragment a veteran piece of printing, in the sense that Sanskrit books had been in print for at least a century by the early Tang Dynasty (Chinese Graphic Arts Net). At first, paper books were printed with page-size carved wooden boards. Five hundred years later, Pi Sheng (c.1041) baked individual reusable ceramic characters in a fire and invented the durable moveable type of modern printing (Silk Road 2000). Abandoning carved wooden tablets, the ‘digitizing’ of Chinese moveable type sped up the production of printed texts. In turn, Pi Sheng’s flexible, rapid, sustainable printing process expanded the political-cultural impact of the literati in Asian society. Digitized block text on paper produced a bureaucratic, literate elite so powerful in Asia that Louis XVI of France copied China’s print-based Confucian system of political authority for his own empire, and so began the rise of the examined public university systems, and the civil service systems, of most European states (Watson, Visions). By reason of its durability, its rapid mechanical reproduction, its culturally agreed signs, literate readership, revered authorship, shared ideology, and distributed portability, a ‘print’ can be a powerful cultural network which builds and expands empires. But print also attacks and destroys empires. A case in point is the Spanish conquest of Aztec America: The Aztecs had immense libraries of American literature on bark-cloth scrolls, a technology which predated paper. These libraries were wiped out by the invading Spanish, who carried a different book before them (Ewins). In the industrial age, the printing press and the gun were seen as the weapons of rebellions everywhere. In 1776, American rebels staffed their ‘Homeland Security’ units with paper makers, knowing that defeating the English would be based on printed and written documents (Hahn). Mao Zedong was a book librarian; Mao said political power came out of the barrel of a gun, but Mao himself came out of a library. With the spread of wireless networked servers, political ferment comes out of the barrel of the cell phone and the internet chat room these days. Witness the cell phone displays of a plane hitting a tower that appear immediately after 9/11 in the Middle East, or witness the show trials of a few US and UK lower ranks who published prints of their torturing activities onto the internet: only lower ranks who published prints were arrested or tried. The control of secure servers and satellites is the new press. These days, we live in a global library of burning books – ‘burning’ in the sense that ‘print’ is now a charged silicon medium (Smith, “Intel”) which is usually made readable by connecting the chip to nuclear reactors and petrochemically-fired power stations. World resources burn as we read our screens. Men, women, children burn too, as we watch our infotainment news in comfort while ‘their’ flickering dead faces are printed in our broadcast hearths. The print we watch is not the living; it is the voodoo of the living in the blackout behind the camera, engaging the blood sacrifice of the tormented and the unfortunate. Internet texts are also ‘on fire’ in the third sense of their fragility and instability as a medium: data bases regularly ‘print’ fail-safe copies in an attempt to postpone the inevitable mechanical, chemical and electrical failure that awaits all electronic media in time. Print defines a moral position for everyone. In reporting conflict, in deciding to go to press or censor, any ‘print’ cannot avoid an ethical context, starting with the fact that there is a difference in power between print maker, armed perpetrators, the weak, the peaceful, the publisher, and the viewer. So many human factors attend a text, video or voice ‘print’: its very existence as an aesthetic object, even before publication and reception, speaks of unbalanced, and therefore dynamic, power relationships. For example, Graham Greene departed unscathed from all the highly dangerous battlefields he entered as a novelist: Riot-torn Germany, London Blitz, Belgian Congo, Voodoo Haiti, Vietnam, Panama, Reagan’s Washington, and mafia Europe. His texts are peopled with the injustices of the less fortunate of the twentieth century, while he himself was a member of the fortunate (if not happy) elite, as is anyone today who has the luxury of time to read Greene’s works for pleasure. Ethically a member of London and Paris’ colonizers, Greene’s best writing still electrifies, perhaps partly because he was in the same line of fire as the victims he shared bread with. In fact, Greene hoped daily that he would escape from the dreadful conflicts he fictionalized via a body bag or an urn of ashes (see Sherry). In reading an author’s biography we have one window on the ethical dimensions of authority and print. If a print’s aesthetics are sometimes enduring, its ethical relationships are always mutable. Take the stylized logo of a running athlete: four limbs bent in a rotation of action. This dynamic icon has symbolized ‘good health’ in Hindu and Buddhist culture, from Madras to Tokyo, for thousands of years. The cross of bent limbs was borrowed for the militarized health programs of 1930s Germany, and, because of what was only a brief, recent, isolated yet monstrously horrific segment of its history in print, the bent-limbed swastika is now a vilified symbol in the West. The sign remains ‘impressed’ differently on traditional Eastern culture, and without the taint of Nazism. Dramatic prints are emotionally charged because, in depicting Homo sapiens in danger, or passionately in love, they elicit a hormonal reaction from the reader, the viewer, or the audience. The type of emotions triggered by a print vary across the whole gamut of human chemistry. A recent study of three genres of motion picture prints shows a marked differences in the hormonal responses of men compared to women when viewing a romance, an actioner, and a documentary (see Schultheiss, Wirth, and Stanton). Society is biochemically diverse in its engagement with printed culture, which raises questions about equality in the arts. Motion picture prints probably comprise around one third of internet traffic, in the form of stolen digitized movie files pirated across the globe via peer-to-peer file transfer networks (p2p), and burnt as DVD laser prints (BBC). There is also a US 40 billion dollar per annum legitimate commerce in DVD laser pressings (Grassl), which would suggest an US 80 billion per annum world total in legitimate laser disc print culture. The actively screen literate, or the ‘sliterati’ as I prefer to call them, research this world of motion picture prints via their peers, their internet information channels, their television programming, and their web forums. Most of this activity occurs outside the ambit of universities and schools. One large site of sliterate (screen literate) practice outside most schooling and official research is the net of online forums at imdb.com (International Movie Data Base). Imdb.com ‘prints’ about 25,000,000 top pages per month to client browsers. Hundreds of sliterati forums are located at imdb, including a forum for the Australian movie, Muriel’s Wedding (Hogan). Ten years after the release of Muriel’s Wedding, young people who are concerned with victimization and bullying still log on to http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/> and put their thoughts into print: I still feel so bad for Muriel in the beginning of the movie, when the girls ‘dump’ her, and how much the poor girl cried and cried! Those girls were such biartches…I love how they got their comeuppance! bunniesormaybemidgets’s comment is typical of the current discussion. Muriel’s Wedding was a very popular film in its first cinema edition in Australia and elsewhere. About 30% of the entire over-14 Australian population went to see this photochemical polyester print in the cinemas on its first release. A decade on, the distributors printed a DVD laser disc edition. The story concerns Muriel (played by Toni Collette), the unemployed daughter of a corrupt, ‘police state’ politician. Muriel is bullied by her peers and she withdraws into a fantasy world, deluding herself that a white wedding will rescue her from the torments of her blighted life. Through theft and deceit (the modus operandi of her father) Muriel escapes to the entertainment industry and finds a ‘wicked’ girlfriend mentor. From a rebellious position of stubborn independence, Muriel plays out her fantasy. She gets her white wedding, before seeing both her father and her new married life as hollow shams which have goaded her abandoned mother to suicide. Redefining her life as a ‘game’ and assuming responsibility for her independence, Muriel turns her back on the mainstream, image-conscious, female gang of her oppressed youth. Muriel leaves the story, having rekindled her friendship with her rebel mentor. My methodological approach to viewing the laser disc print was to first make a more accessible, coded record of the entire movie. I was able to code and record the print in real time, using a new metalanguage (Watson, “Eyes”). The advantage of Coding is that ‘thinks’ the same way as film making, it does not sidetrack the analyst into prose. The Code splits the movie print into Vision Action [vision graphic elements, including text] (sound) The Coding splits the vision track into normal action and graphic elements, such as text, so this Coding is an ideal method for extracting all the text elements of a film in real time. After playing the film once, I had four and a half tightly packed pages of the coded story, including all its text elements in square brackets. Being a unique, indexed hard copy, the Coded copy allowed me immediate access to any point of the Muriel’s Wedding saga without having to search the DVD laser print. How are ‘print’ elements used in Muriel’s Wedding? Firstly, a rose-coloured monoprint of Muriel Heslop’s smiling face stares enigmatically from the plastic surface of the DVD picture disc. The print is a still photo captured from her smile as she walked down the aisle of her white wedding. In this print, Toni Collette is the Mona Lisa of Australian culture, except that fans of Muriel’s Wedding know the meaning of that smile is a magical combination of the actor’s art: the smile is both the flush of dreams come true and the frightening self deception that will kill her mother. Inserting and playing the disc, the text-dominant menu appears, and the film commences with the text-dominant opening titles. Text and titles confer a legitimacy on a work, whether it is a trade mark of the laser print owners, or the household names of stars. Text titles confer status relationships on both the presenters of the cultural artifact and the viewer who has entered into a legal license agreement with the owners of the movie. A title makes us comfortable, because the mind always seeks to name the unfamiliar, and a set of text titles does that job for us so that we can navigate the ‘tracks’ and settle into our engagement with the unfamiliar. The apparent ‘truth’ and ‘stability’ of printed text calms our fears and beguiles our uncertainties. Muriel attends the white wedding of a school bully bride, wearing a leopard print dress she has stolen. Muriel’s spotted wild animal print contrasts with the pure white handmade dress of the bride. In Muriel’s leopard textile print, we have the wild, rebellious, impoverished, inappropriate intrusion into the social ritual and fantasy of her high-status tormentor. An off-duty store detective recognizes the printed dress and calls the police. The police are themselves distinguished by their blue-and-white checked prints and other mechanically reproduced impressions of cultural symbols: in steel, brass, embroidery, leather and plastics. Muriel is driven in the police car past the stenciled town sign (‘Welcome To Porpoise Spit’ heads a paragraph of small print). She is delivered to her father, a politician who presides over the policing of his town. In a state where the judiciary, police and executive are hijacked by the same tyrant, Muriel’s father, Bill, pays off the police constables with a carton of legal drugs (beer) and Muriel must face her father’s wrath, which he proceeds to transfer to his detested wife. Like his daughter, the father also wears a spotted brown print costume, but his is a batik print from neighbouring Indonesia (incidentally, in a nation that takes the political status of its batik prints very seriously). Bill demands that Muriel find the receipt for the leopard print dress she claims she has purchased. The legitimate ownership of the object is enmeshed with a printed receipt, the printed evidence of trade. The law (and the paramilitary power behind the law) are legitimized, or contested, by the presence or absence of printed text. Muriel hides in her bedroom, surround by poster prints of the pop group ABBA. Torn-out prints of other people’s weddings adorn her mirror. Her face is embossed with the clown-like primary colours of the marionette as she lifts a bouquet to her chin and stares into the real time ‘print’ of her mirror image. Bill takes the opportunity of a business meeting with Japanese investors to feed his entire family at ‘Charlie Chan’’s restaurant. Muriel’s middle sister sloppily wears her father’s state election tee shirt, printed with the text: ‘Vote 1, Bill Heslop. You can’t stop progress.’ The text sets up two ironic gags that are paid off on the dialogue track: “He lost,’ we are told. ‘Progress’ turns out to be funding the concreting of a beach. Bill berates his daughter Muriel: she has no chance of becoming a printer’s apprentice and she has failed a typing course. Her dysfunction in printed text has been covered up by Bill: he has bribed the typing teacher to issue a printed diploma to his daughter. In the gambling saloon of the club, under the arrays of mechanically repeated cultural symbols lit above the poker machines (‘A’ for ace, ‘Q’ for queen, etc.), Bill’s secret girlfriend Diedre risks giving Muriel a cosmetics job. Another text icon in lights announces the surf nightclub ‘Breakers’. Tania, the newly married queen bitch who has made Muriel’s teenage years a living hell, breaks up with her husband, deciding to cash in his negotiable text documents – his Bali honeymoon tickets – and go on an island holiday with her girlfriends instead. Text documents are the enduring site of agreements between people and also the site of mutations to those agreements. Tania dumps Muriel, who sobs and sobs. Sobs are a mechanical, percussive reproduction impressed on the sound track. Returning home, we discover that Muriel’s older brother has failed a printed test and been rejected for police recruitment. There is a high incidence of print illiteracy in the Heslop family. Mrs Heslop (Jeannie Drynan), for instance, regularly has trouble at the post office. Muriel sees a chance to escape the oppression of her family by tricking her mother into giving her a blank cheque. Here is the confluence of the legitimacy of a bank’s printed negotiable document with the risk and freedom of a blank space for rebel Muriel’s handwriting. Unable to type, her handwriting has the power to steal every cent of her father’s savings. She leaves home and spends the family’s savings at an island resort. On the island, the text print-challenged Muriel dances to a recording (sound print) of ABBA, her hand gestures emphasizing her bewigged face, which is made up in an impression of her pop idol. Her imitation of her goddesses – the ABBA women, her only hope in a real world of people who hate or avoid her – is accompanied by her goddesses’ voices singing: ‘the mystery book on the shelf is always repeating itself.’ Before jpeg and gif image downloads, we had postcard prints and snail mail. Muriel sends a postcard to her family, lying about her ‘success’ in the cosmetics business. The printed missal is clutched by her father Bill (Bill Hunter), who proclaims about his daughter, ‘you can’t type but you really impress me’. Meanwhile, on Hibiscus Island, Muriel lies under a moonlit palm tree with her newly found mentor, ‘bad girl’ Ronda (Rachel Griffiths). In this critical scene, where foolish Muriel opens her heart’s yearnings to a confidante she can finally trust, the director and DP have chosen to shoot a flat, high contrast blue filtered image. The visual result is very much like the semiabstract Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints by Utamaro. This Japanese printing style informed the rise of European modern painting (Monet, Van Gogh, Picasso, etc., were all important collectors and students of Ukiyo-e prints). The above print and text elements in Muriel’s Wedding take us 27 minutes into her story, as recorded on a single page of real-time handwritten Coding. Although not discussed here, the Coding recorded the complete film – a total of 106 minutes of text elements and main graphic elements – as four pages of Code. Referring to this Coding some weeks after it was made, I looked up the final code on page four: taxi [food of the sea] bq. Translation: a shop sign whizzes past in the film’s background, as Muriel and Ronda leave Porpoise Spit in a taxi. Over their heads the text ‘Food Of The Sea’ flashes. We are reminded that Muriel and Ronda are mermaids, fantastic creatures sprung from the brow of author PJ Hogan, and illuminated even today in the pantheon of women’s coming-of-age art works. That the movie is relevant ten years on is evidenced by the current usage of the Muriel’s Wedding online forum, an intersection of wider discussions by sliterate women on imdb.com who, like Muriel, are observers (and in some cases victims) of horrific pressure from ambitious female gangs and bullies. Text is always a minor element in a motion picture (unless it is a subtitled foreign film) and text usually whizzes by subliminally while viewing a film. By Coding the work for [text], all the text nuances made by the film makers come to light. While I have viewed Muriel’s Wedding on many occasions, it has only been in Coding it specifically for text that I have noticed that Muriel is a representative of that vast class of talented youth who are discriminated against by print (as in text) educators who cannot offer her a life-affirming identity in the English classroom. Severely depressed at school, and failing to type or get a printer’s apprenticeship, Muriel finds paid work (and hence, freedom, life, identity, independence) working in her audio visual printed medium of choice: a video store in a new city. Muriel found a sliterate admirer at the video store but she later dumped him for her fantasy man, before leaving him too. One of the points of conjecture on the imdb Muriel’s Wedding site is, did Muriel (in the unwritten future) get back together with admirer Brice Nobes? That we will never know. While a print forms a track that tells us where culture has been, a print cannot be the future, a print is never animate reality. At the end of any trail of prints, one must lift one’s head from the last impression, and negotiate satisfaction in the happening world. References Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “Memo Shows US General Approved Interrogations.” 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. British Broadcasting Commission. “Films ‘Fuel Online File-Sharing’.’’ 22 Feb. 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3890527.stm>. Bretherton, I. “The Origins of Attachment Theory: John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.” 1994. 23 Jan. 2005 http://www.psy.med.br/livros/autores/bowlby/bowlby.pdf>. Bunniesormaybemidgets. Chat Room Comment. “What Did Those Girls Do to Rhonda?” 28 Mar. 2005 http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0110598/board/>. Chinese Graphic Arts Net. Mantras of the Dharani Sutra. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.cgan.com/english/english/cpg/engcp10.htm>. Ewins, R. Barkcloth and the Origins of Paper. 1991. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.justpacific.com/pacific/papers/barkcloth~paper.html>. Grassl K.R. The DVD Statistical Report. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.corbell.com>. Hahn, C. M. The Topic Is Paper. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.nystamp.org/Topic_is_paper.html>. Harper, D. Online Etymology Dictionary. 14 Mar. 2005 http://www.etymonline.com/>. Mask of Zorro, The. Screenplay by J McCulley. UA, 1920. Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. PJ Hogan. Perf. Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, Bill Hunter, and Jeannie Drynan. Village Roadshow, 1994. O’Hagan, Jack. On The Road to Gundagai. 1922. 2 Apr. 2005 http://ingeb.org/songs/roadtogu.html>. Poole, J.H., P.L. Tyack, A.S. Stoeger-Horwath, and S. Watwood. “Animal Behaviour: Elephants Are Capable of Vocal Learning.” Nature 24 Mar. 2005. Sanchez, R. “Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy.” 14 Sept. 2003. 30 Mar. 2005 http://www.abc.net.au>. Schultheiss, O.C., M.M. Wirth, and S.J. Stanton. “Effects of Affiliation and Power Motivation Arousal on Salivary Progesterone and Testosterone.” Hormones and Behavior 46 (2005). Sherry, N. The Life of Graham Greene. 3 vols. London: Jonathan Cape 2004, 1994, 1989. Silk Road. Printing. 2000. 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.silk-road.com/artl/printing.shtml>. Smith, T. “Elpida Licenses ‘DVD on a Chip’ Memory Tech.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. —. “Intel Boffins Build First Continuous Beam Silicon Laser.” The Register 20 Feb. 2005 http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02>. Watson, R. S. “Eyes And Ears: Dramatic Memory Slicing and Salable Media Content.” Innovation and Speculation, ed. Brad Haseman. Brisbane: QUT. [in press] Watson, R. S. Visions. Melbourne: Curriculum Corporation, 1994. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Watson, Robert. "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>. APA Style Watson, R. (Jun. 2005) "E-Press and Oppress: Audio Visual Print Drama, Identity, Text and Motion Picture Rebellion," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/08-watson.php>.

Consumer or home use (previously ‘amateur’) moving image formats are distinguished from professional (still known as ‘professional’) ones by relative affordability, ubiquity and simplicity of use. Since Pathé Frères released its Pathé Baby camera, projector and 9.5mm film gauge in 1922, a distinct line of viewing and making equipment has been successfully marketed at nonprofessional use, especially in the home. ‘Amateur film’ is a simple term for a complex, variegated and longstanding set of activities. Conceptually it is bounded only by the negative definition of nonprofessional (usually intended as sub-professional), and the positive definition of being for the love of the activity and motivated by personal passion alone. This defines a field broad enough that two major historians of US amateur film, Patricia R. Zimmermann and Alan D. Kattelle, write about different subjects. Zimmermann focuses chiefly on domestic use and ‘how-to’ literature, while Kattelle unearths the collective practices and institutional structure of the Amateur Ciné Clubs and the Amateur Ciné League (Zimmerman, Reel Families, Professional; Kattelle, Home Movies, Amateur Ciné). Marion Norris Gleason, a test subject in Eastman Kodak’s development of 16mm and advocate of amateur film, defined it as having three parts, the home movie, “the photoplay produced by organised groups”, and the experimental film (Swanson 132). This view was current at least until the 1960s, when domestic documentation, Amateur Ciné clubs and experimental filmmakers shared the same film gauges and space in the same amateur film magazines, but paths have diverged somewhat since then. Domestic documentation remains committed to the moving image technology du jour, the Amateur Ciné movement is much reduced, and experimental film has developed a separate identity, its own institutional structure, and won some legitimacy in the art world. The trajectory of Super 8, a late-coming gauge to amateur film, has been defined precisely by this disintegration. Obsolescence was manufactured far more slowly during the long reign of amateur film gauges, allowing 9.5mm (1922-66), 16mm (1923-), 8mm (1932-), and Super 8 (1965-) to engage in protracted format wars significantly longer than the life spans of their analogue and digital video successors. The range of options available to nonprofessional makers – the quality but relative expense of 16mm, the near 16mm frame size of 9.5mm, the superior stability of 8mm compared to 9.5mm and Super 8, the size of Super 8’s picture relative to 8mm’s – are not surprising in the context of general competition for a diverse popular market on the usual basis of price, quality, and novelty. However, since analogue video’s ascent the amateur film gauges have all comprehensibly lost the battle for the home use market. This was by far the largest section of amateur film and the manufacturers’ overt target segment, so the amateur film gauges’ contemporary survival and significance is as something else. Though all the gauges from 8mm to 16mm remain available today to the curious and enthusiastic, Super 8’s afterlife is distinguished by the peculiar combination of having been a tremendously popular substandard to the substandard (ie, to 16mm, the standardised film gauge directly below 35mm in both price and quality), and now being prized for its technological excellence. When the large scale consumption that had supported Super 8’s manufacture dropped away, it revealed the set of much smaller, apparently non-transferable uses that would determine whether and as what Super 8 survived. Consequently, though Super 8 has been superseded many times over as a home movie format, it is not obsolete today as an art medium, a professional format used in the commercial industry, or as an alternative to digital video and 16mm for low budget independent production. In other words, everything it was never intended to be. I lately witnessed an occasion of the kind of high-fetishism for film-versus-video and analogue-versus-digital that the experimental moving image world is justifiably famed for. Discussion around the screening of Peter Tscherkassky’s films at the Xperimenta ‘09 festival raised the specifics and availability of the technology he relies on, both because of the peculiarity of his production method – found-footage collaging onto black and white 35mm stock via handheld light pen – and the issue of projection. Has digital technology supplied an alternative workflow? Would 35mm stock to work on (and prints to pillage) continue to be available? Is the availability of 35mm projectors in major venues holding up? Although this insider view of 35mm’s waning market share was more a performance of technological cultural politics than an analysis of it, it raised a series of issues central to any such analysis. Each film format is a gestalt item, consisting of four parts (that an individual might own): film stock, camera, projector and editor. Along with the availability of processing services, these items comprise a gauge’s viability (not withstanding the existence of camera-less and unedited workflows, and numerous folk developing methods). All these are needed to conjure the geist of the machine at full strength. More importantly, the discussion highlights what happens when such a technology collides with idiosyncratic and unintended use, which happens only because it is manufactured on a much wider scale than eccentric use alone can support. Although nostalgia often plays a role in the advocacy of obsolete technology, its role here should be carefully qualified and not overstated. If it plays a role in the three main economies that support contemporary Super 8, it need not be the same role. Further, even though it is now chiefly the same specialist shops and technicians that supply and service 9.5mm, 8mm, Super 8, and 16mm, they are not sold on the same scale nor to the same purpose. There has been no reported Renaissances of 9.5mm or 8mm, though, as long term home movie formats, they must loom large in the memories of many, and their particular look evokes pastness as surely as any two-colour process. There are some specifics to the trajectory of Super 8 as a non-amateur format that cannot simply be subsumed to general nostalgia or dead technology fetishism. Super 8 as an Art Medium Super 8 has a longer history as an art medium than as a pro-tool or low budget substandard. One key aspect in the invention and supply of amateur film was that it not be an adequate substitute for the professional technology used to populate the media sphere proper. Thus the price of access to motion picture making through amateur gauges has been a marginalisation of the outcome for format reasons alone (Zimmermann, Professional 24; Reekie 110) Eastman Kodak established their 16mm as the acceptable substandard for many non-theatrical uses of film in the 1920s, Pathé’s earlier 28mm having already had some success in this area (Mebold and Tepperman 137, 148-9). But 16mm was still relatively expensive for the home market, and when Kiyooka Eiichi filmed his drive across the US in 1927, his 16mm camera alone cost more than his car (Ruoff 240, 243). Against this, 9.5mm, 8mm and eventually Super 8 were the increasingly affordable substandards to the substandard, marginalised twice over in the commercial world, but far more popular in the consumer market. The 1960s underground film, and the modern artists’ film that was partly recuperated from it, was overwhelmingly based on 16mm, as the collections of its chief distributors, the New York Film-Makers’ Co-op, Canyon Cinema and the Lux clearly show. In the context of experimental film’s longstanding commitment to 16mm, an artist filmmaker’s choice to work with Super 8 had important resonances. Experimental work on 8mm and Super 8 is not hard to come by, even from the 1960s, but consider the cultural stakes of Jonas Mekas’s description of 8mm films as “beautiful folk art, like song and lyric poetry, that was created by the people” (Mekas 83). The evocation of ‘folk art’ signals a yawning gap between 8mm, whose richness has been produced collectively by a large and anonymous group, and the work produced by individual artists such as those (like Mekas himself) who founded the New American Cinema Group. The resonance for artists of the 1960s and 1970s who worked with 8mm and Super 8 was from their status as the premier vulgar film gauge, compounding-through-repetition their choice to work with film at all. By the time Super 8 was declared ‘dead’ in 1980, numerous works by canonical artists had been made in the format (Stan Brakhage, Derek Jarman, Carolee Schneemann, Anthony McCall), and various practices had evolved around the specific possibilities of this emulsion and that camera. The camcorder not only displaced Super 8 as the simplest to use, most ubiquitous and cheapest moving image format, at the same time it changed the hierarchy of moving image formats because Super 8 was now incontestably better than something. Further, beyond the ubiquity, simplicity and size, camcorder video and Super 8 film had little in common. Camcorder replay took advantage of the ubiquity of television, but to this day video projection remains a relatively expensive business and for some time after 1980 the projectors were rare and of undistinguished quality. Until the more recent emergence of large format television (also relatively expensive), projection was necessary to screen to anything beyond very small audience. So, considering the gestalt aspect of these technologies and their functions, camcorders could replace Super 8 only for the capture of home movies and small-scale domestic replay. Super 8 maintained its position as the cheapest way into filmmaking for at least 20 years after its ‘death’, but lost its position as the premier ‘folk’ moving image format. It remained a key format for experimental film through the 1990s, but with constant competition from evolving analogue and digital video, and improved and more affordable video projection, its market share diminished. Kodak has continued to assert the viability of its film stocks and gauges, but across 2005-06 it deleted its Kodachrome Super 8, 16mm and slide range (Kodak, Kodachrome). This became a newsworthy Super 8 story (see Morgan; NYT; Hodgkinson; Radio 4) because Super 8 was the first deletion announced, this was very close to 8 May 2005, which was Global Super 8 Day, Kodachrome 40 (K40) was Super 8’s most famous and still used stock, and because 2005 was Super 8’s 40th birthday. Kodachome was then the most long-lived colour process still available, but there were only two labs left in the world which could supply processing- Kodak’s Lausanne Kodachrome lab in Switzerland, using the authentic company method, and Dwayne’s Photo in the US, using a tolerable but substandard process (Hodgkinson). Kodak launched a replacement stock simultaneously, and indeed the variety of Super 8 stocks is increasing year to year, partly because of new Kodak releases and partly because other companies split Kodak’s 16mm and 35mm stock for use as Super 8 (Allen; Muldowney; Pro8mm; Dager). Nonetheless, the cancelling of K40 convulsed the artists’ film community, and a spirited defence of its unique and excellent properties was lead by artist and activist Pip Chodorov. Chodorov met with a Kodak executive at the Cannes Film Festival, appealed to the French Government and started an online petition. His campaign circular read: EXPLAIN THE ADVANTAGES OF K40We have to show why we care specifically about Kodachrome and why Ektachrome is not a replacement. Kodachrome […] whose fine grain and warm colors […] are often used as a benchmark of quality for other stocks. The unique qualities of the Kodachrome image should be pointed out, and especially the differences between Kodachrome and Ektachrome […]. What great films were shot in Kodachrome, and why? […] What are the advantages to the K-14 process and the Lausanne laboratory? Is K40 a more stable stock, is it more preservable, do the colors fade resistant? Point out differences in the sensitometry curves, the grain structure... There was a rash of protest screenings, including a special all-day programme at Le Festival des Cinemas Différents de Paris, about which Raphaël Bassan wrote This initiative was justified, Kodak having announced in 2005 that it was going to stop the manufacturing of the ultra-sensitive film Kodachrome 40, which allowed such recognized artists as Gérard Courant, Joseph Morder, Stéphane Marti and a whole new generation of filmmakers to express themselves through this supple and inexpensive format with such a particular texture. (Bassan) The distance Super 8 has travelled culturally since analogue video can be seen in the distance between these statements of excellence and the attributes of Super 8 and 8mm that appealed to earlier artists: The great thing about Super 8 is that you can switch is onto automatic and get beyond all those technicalities” (Jarman)An 8mm camera is the ballpoint of the visual world. Soon […] people will use camera-pens as casually as they jot memos today […] and the narrow gauge can make finished works of art. (Durgnat 30) Far from the traits that defined it as an amateur gauge, Super 8 is now lionised in terms more resembling a chemistry historian’s eulogy to the pigments used in Dark Ages illuminated manuscripts. From bic to laspis lazuli. Indie and Pro Super 8 Historian of the US amateur film Patricia R. Zimmermann has charted the long collision between small gauge film, domesticity and the various ‘how-to’ publications designed to bridge the gap. In this she pays particular attention to the ‘how-to’ publications’ drive to assert the commercial feature film as the only model worthy of emulation (Professional 267; Reel xii). This drive continues today in numerous magazines and books addressing the consumer and pro-sumer levels. Alan D. Kattelle has charted a different history of the US amateur film, concentrating on the cine clubs and their national organisation, the Amateur Cine League (ACL), competitive events and distribution, a somewhat less domestic part of the movement which aimed less at family documentation more toward ‘photo-plays’, travelogues and instructionals. Just as interested in achieving professional results with amateur means, the ACL encouraged excellence and some of their filmmakers received commissions to make more widely seen films (Kattelle, Amateur 242). The ACL’s Ten Best competition still exists as The American International Film and Video Festival (Kattelle, Amateur 242), but its remit has changed from being “a showcase for amateur films” to being open “to all non-commercial films regardless of the status of the film makers” (AMPS). This points to both the relative marginalisation of the mid-century notion of the amateur, and that successful professionals and others working in the penumbra of independent production surrounding the industry proper are now important contributors to the festival. Both these groups are the economically important contemporary users of Super 8, but they use it in different ways. Low budget productions use it as cheap alternative to larger gauges or HD digital video and a better capture format than dv, while professional productions use it as a lo-fi format precisely for its degradation and archaic home movie look (Allen; Polisin). Pro8mm is a key innovator, service provider and advocate of Super 8 as an industry standard tool, and is an important and long serving agent in what should be seen as the normalisation of Super 8 – a process of redressing its pariah status as a cheap substandard to the substandard, while progressively erasing the special qualities of Super 8 that underlay this. The company started as Super8 Sound, innovating a sync-sound system in 1971, prior to the release of Kodak’s magnetic stripe sound Super 8 in 1973. Kodak’s Super 8 sound film was discontinued in 1997, and in 2005 Pro8mm produced the Max8 format by altering camera front ends to shoot onto the unused stripe space, producing a better quality image for widescreen. In between they started cutting professional 35mm stocks for Super 8 cameras and are currently investing in ever more high-quality HD film scanners (Allen; Pro8mm). Simultaneous to this, Kodak has brought out a series of stocks for Super 8, and more have been cut down for Super 8 by third parties, that offer a wider range of light responses or ever finer grain structure, thus progressively removing the limitations and visible artefacts associated with the format (Allen; Muldowney; Perkins; Kodak, Motion). These films stocks are designed to be captured to digital video as a normal part of their processing, and then entered into the contemporary digital work flow, leaving little or no indication of the their origins on a format designed to be the 1960s equivalent of the Box Brownie. However, while Super 8 has been used by financially robust companies to produce full-length programmes, its role at the top end of production is more usually as home movie footage and/or to evoke pastness. When service provider and advocate OnSuper8 interviewed professional cinematographer James Chressanthis, he asserted that “if there is a problem with Super 8 it is that it can look too good!” and spent much of the interview explaining how a particular combination of stocks, low shutter speeds and digital conversion could reproduce the traditional degraded look and avoid “looking like a completely transparent professional medium” (Perkins). In his history of the British amateur movement, Duncan Reekie deals with this distinction between the professional and amateur moving image, defining the professional as having a drive towards clarity [that] eventually produced [what] we could term ‘hyper-lucidity’, a form of cinematography which idealises the perception of the human eye: deep focus, increased colour saturation, digital effects and so on. (108) Against this the amateur as distinguished by a visible cinematic surface, where the screen image does not seem natural or fluent but is composed of photographic grain which in 8mm appears to vibrate and weave. Since the amateur often worked with only one reversal print the final film would also often become scratched and dirty. (108-9) As Super 8’s function has moved away from the home movie, so its look has adjusted to the new role. Kodak’s replacement for K40 was finer grained (Kodak, Kodak), designed for a life as good to high quality digital video rather than a film strip, and so for video replay rather than a small gauge projector. In the economy that supports Super 8’s survival, its cameras and film stock have become part of a different gestalt. Continued use is still justified by appeals to geist, but the geist of film in a general and abstract way, not specific to Super 8 and more closely resembling the industry-centric view of film propounded by decades of ‘how-to’ guides. Activity that originally supported Super 8 continues, and currently has embraced the ubiquitous and extremely substandard cameras embedded in mobile phones and still cameras for home movies and social documentation. As Super 8 has moved to a new cultural position it has shed its most recognisable trait, the visible surface of grain and scratches, and it is that which has become obsolete, discontinued and the focus of nostalgia, along with the sound of a film projector (which you can get to go with films transferred to dvd). So it will be left to artist filmmaker Peter Tscherkassky, talking in 1995 about what Super 8 was to him in the 1980s, to evoke what there is to miss about Super 8 today. Unlike any other format, Super-8 was a microscope, making visible the inner life of images by entering beneath the skin of reality. […] Most remarkable of all was the grain. While 'resolution' is the technical term for the sharpness of a film image, Super-8 was really never too concerned with this. Here, quite a different kind of resolution could be witnessed: the crystal-clear and bright light of a Xenon-projection gave us shapes dissolving into the grain; amorphous bodies and forms surreptitiously transformed into new shapes and disappeared again into a sea of colour. Super-8 was the pointillism, impressionism and the abstract expressionism of cinematography. (Howath) Bibliography Allen, Tom. “‘Making It’ in Super 8.” MovieMaker Magazine 8 Feb. 1994. 1 May 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/making_it_in_super_8_3044/›. AMPS. “About the American Motion Picture Society.” American Motion Picture Society site. 2009. 25 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.ampsvideo.com›. Bassan, Raphaël. “Identity of Cinema: Experimental and Different (review of Festival des Cinémas Différents de Paris, 2005).” Senses of Cinema 44 (July-Sep. 2007). 25 Apr. 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/experimental-cinema-bassan.html›. Chodorov, Pip. “To Save Kodochrome.” Frameworks list, 14 May 2005. 28 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw29/0216.html›. Dager, Nick. “Kodak Unveils Latest Film Stock in Vision3 Family.” Digital Cinema Report 5 Jan. 2009. 27 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/Kodak-Vision3-film›. Durgnat, Raymond. “Flyweight Flicks.” GAZWRX: The Films of Jeff Keen booklet. Originally published in Films and Filming (Feb. 1965). London: BFI, 2009. 30-31. Frye, Brian L. “‘Me, I Just Film My Life’: An Interview with Jonas Mekas.” Senses of Cinema 44 (July-Sep. 2007). 15 Apr. 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/jonas-mekas-interview.html›. Hodgkinson, Will. “End of the Reel for Super 8.” Guardian 28 Sep. 2006. 20 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2006/sep/28/1›. Horwath, Alexander. “Singing in the Rain - Supercinematography by Peter Tscherkassky.” Senses of Cinema 28 (Sep.-Oct. 2003). 5 May 2009 ‹http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/28/tscherkassky.html›. Jarman, Derek. In Institute of Contemporary Arts Video Library Guide. London: ICA, 1987. Kattelle, Alan D. Home Movies: A History of the American Industry, 1897-1979. Hudson, Mass.: self-published, 2000. ———. “The Amateur Cinema League and its films.” Film History 15.2 (2003): 238-51. Kodak. “Kodak Celebrates 40th Anniversary of Super 8 Film Announces New Color Reversal Product to Portfolio.“ Frameworks list, 9 May 2005. 23 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw29/0150.html›. ———. “Kodachrome Update.” 30 Jun. 2006. 24 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.hi-beam.net/fw/fw32/0756.html›. ———. “Motion Picture Film, Digital Cinema, Digital Intermediate.” 2009. 2 Apr. 2009 ‹http://motion.kodak.com/US/en/motion/index.htm?CID=go&idhbx=motion›. Mekas, Jonas. “8mm as Folk Art.” Movie Journal: The Rise of the New American Cinema, 1959-1971. Ed. Jonas Mekas. Originally Published in Village Voice 1963. New York: Macmillan, 1972. Morgan, Spencer. “Kodak, Don't Take My Kodachrome.” New York Times 31 May 2005. 4 Apr. 2009 ‹http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E1DF1F39F932A05756C0A9639C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2›. ———. “Fans Beg: Don't Take Kodachrome Away.” New York Times 1 Jun. 2005. 4 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/31/technology/31iht-kodak.html›. Muldowney, Lisa. “Kodak Ups the Ante with New Motion Picture Film.” MovieMaker Magazine 30 Nov. 2007. 6 Apr. 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/cinematography/article/kodak_ups_the_ante_with_new_motion_picture_film/›. New York Times. “Super 8 Blues.” 31 May 2005: E1. Perkins, Giles. “A Pro's Approach to Super 8.” OnSuper8 Blogspot 16 July 2007. 13 Apr. 2009 ‹http://onsuper8.blogspot.com/2007/07/pros-approach-to-super-8.html›. Polisin, Douglas. “Pro8mm Asks You to Think Big, Shoot Small.” MovieMaker Magazine 4 Feb. 2009. 1 May 2009 ‹http://www.moviemaker.com/cinematography/article/think_big_shoot_small_rhonda_vigeant_pro8mm_20090127/›. Pro8mm. “Pro8mm Company History.” Super 8 /16mm Cameras, Film, Processing & Scanning (Pro8mm blog) 12 Mar. 2008. 3 May 2009 ‹http://pro8mm-burbank.blogspot.com/2008/03/pro8mm-company-history.html›. Radio 4. No More Yellow Envelopes 24 Dec. 2006. 4 May 2009 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/m6yx0/›. Reekie, Duncan. Subversion: The Definitive History of the Underground Cinema. London: Wallflower Press, 2007. Sneakernet, Christopher Hutsul. “Kodachrome: Not Digital, But Still Delightful.” Toronto Star 26 Sep. 2005. Swanson, Dwight. “Inventing Amateur Film: Marion Norris Gleason, Eastman Kodak and the Rochester Scene, 1921-1932.” Film History 15.2 (2003): 126-36 Zimmermann, Patricia R. “Professional Results with Amateur Ease: The Formation of Amateur Filmmaking Aesthetics 1923-1940.” Film History 2.3 (1988): 267-81. ———. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995.

Introduction Jerusalema, a song from Mzansi — an informal isiZulu name for South Africa — became a global hit during the Covid-19 pandemic. Set to a repetitive, slow four-to-a-bar beat characteristic of South African house music, the gospel-influenced song was released through Open Mic Productions in 2019 by the DJ and record producer Kgaogelo Moagi, popularly known as ‘Master KG’. The production resulted from a collaboration between Master KG, the music producer Charmza The DJ, who composed the music, and the vocalist Nomcebo Zikode, who wrote the lyrics and performed the song for the master recording. Jerusalema immediately trended on social media and, as a “soundtrack of the pandemic” (Modise), became one of the most popular songs of 2020. Soon, it reached no. 1 on the music charts in Belgium, Romania, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Switzerland, while going triple platinum in Italy and double platinum in Spain (Hissong). By September 2020, Jerusalema was the most Shazammed song in history. To date, it has generated more than half a billion views on YouTube. After its initial success as a music video, the song’s influence was catapulted to a global cultural phenomenon by the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge video posted by the Angolan dance troupe Fenómenos do Semba in 2020, featuring exquisite dance steps that inspired a viral social media challenge. Some observed that footwork in several of the videos posted, suggested dance types associated with pantsula jive and kwaito music, both of which originated from the black townships of South Africa during the apartheid era. Yet, the leader of the Angolan dance troupe Fenómenos do Semba, Adilson Maiza claimed that the group’s choreography mixed kuduro dance steps (derived from the Angolan Portuguese term “cu duro” or “hard ass”) and Afro-beat. According to Master KG, indeed, the choreography made famous by the Angolan dancers conveyed an Angolan touch, described by Maiza as signature ginga e banga Angolana (Angolan sway and swag; Kabir). As a “counter-contagion” in the age of Coronavirus (Kabir), groups of individuals, ranging from school learners and teachers, police officers, and nursing staff in Africa to priests and nuns in Europe and Palestinians in the Old City of Jerusalem were posting Jerusalema dance videos. Famous efforts came from Vietnam, Switzerland, Ireland, Austria, and Morocco. Numerous videos of healthcare workers became a source of hope for patients with COVID-19 (Chingono). Following the thought of Zygmunt Bauman, in this article I interpret Jerusalema as a “re-enchantment” of a disenchanted world. Focussing on the song’s “magic”, I interrogate why this music video could take on such special meaning for millions of individuals and inspire a viral dance craze. My understanding of “magic” draws on the writings of Patrick Curry, who, in turn, bases his definition of the term on the thought of J.R.R. Tolkien. Curry (5) cites Tolkien in differentiating between two ways in which the word “magic” is generally used: “one to mean enchantment, as in: ‘It was magic!’ and the other to denote a paranormal means to an end, as in: ‘to use magic’”. The argument in this article draws on the first of these explications. As a global media sensation, Jerusalema placed a spotlight on the paucity of a “de-spiritualized, de-animated world,” a world “waging war against mystery and magic” (Baumann x-xi). However, contexts of production and reception, as outlined in Burns and Hawkins (2ff.), warrant consideration of social and cultural values and ideologies masked by the music video’s idealised representation of everyday South African life and its glamourised expression of faith. Thus, while referring to the millennia-old Jerusalem trope and its ensuing mythologies via an intertextual reading, I shall also consider the song alongside the South African-produced epic gangster action film Jerusalema (2008; Orange) while furthermore reflecting on the contexts of its production. Why Jerusalema — Why Its “Magic”? The global fame attained by Master KG’s Jerusalema brought to the fore questions of what made the song and its ensuing dance challenge so exceptional and what lay behind its “magic” (Ndzuta). The song’s simple yet deeply spiritual words appeal to God to take the singer to the heavenly city. In an abbreviated form, as translated from the original isiZulu, the words mean, “Jerusalem is my home, guard me, walk with me, do not leave me here — Jerusalem is my home, my place is not here, my kingdom is not here” (“Jerusalema Lyrics in English”). These words speak of the yearning for salvation, home, and togetherness, with Jerusalem as its spiritual embodiment. As Ndzuta notes, few South African songs have achieved the kind of global status attained by “Jerusalema”. A prominent earlier example is Miriam Makeba’s dance hit Pata Pata, released in the 1960s during the apartheid era. The song’s global impact was enabled by Makeba’s fame and talent as a singer and her political activism against the apartheid regime (Ndzuta). Similarly, the South African hits included on Paul Simon’s Graceland album (1986) — like Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Homeless — emanated from a specific politico-historical moment that, despite critique against Simon for violating the cultural boycott against South Africa at the time, facilitated their international impact and dissemination (Denselow). Jerusalema’s fame was not tied to political activism but derived from the turbulent times of the COVID-19 pandemic, which, according to statistics published by the World Health Organization, by the end of 2020 had claimed more than 3 million lives globally (“True Death Toll of Covid-19”). Within this context, the song’s message of divine guidance and the protection of a spiritual home was particularly relevant as it lifted global spirits darkened by the pandemic and the many losses it incurred. Likewise, the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge brought joy and feelings of togetherness during these challenging times, as was evidenced by the countless videos posted online. The Magic of the Myth Central to the lyrics of Jerusalema is the city of Jerusalem, which has, as Hees (95) notes, for millennia been “an intense marker of personal, social and religious identity and aspirations in words and music”. Nevertheless, Master KG’s Jerusalema differs from other “Jerusalem songs” in that it encompasses dense layering of “enchantment”. In contrast to Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s Awu Jerusalema, for instance, with its solemn, hymn-like structure and close harmonic vocal delivery, Master KG’s Jerusalema features Nomcebo’s sensuous and versatile voice in a gripping version of the South African house/gospel style known affectionately as the “Amapiano sound” — a raw hybrid of deep house, jazz and lounge music characterised by the use of synthesizers and wide percussive basslines (Seroto). In the original music video, in combination with Nomcebo’s soulful rendition, visuals featuring everyday scenes from South African township life take on alluring, if not poetic dimensions — a magical sensory mix, to which an almost imperceptible slow-motion camera effect adds the impression of “time slowing down”, simultaneously “softening” images of poverty and decay. Fig. 1: “Enchantment” and the joy of the dance. Still from the video “Jerusalema”. From a philosophical perspective, Zygmunt Bauman (xi) contends that “it is against a dis-enchanted world that the postmodern re-enchantment is aimed”. Yet, in a more critical vein, he also argues that, within the postmodern condition, humanity has been left alone with its fears and with an existential void that is “here to stay”: “postmodernity has not allayed the fears that modernity injected into humanity; postmodernity only privatized these fears”. For this reason, Bauman believes, postmodernity “had to become an age of imagined communities” (xviii-xxix). Furthermore, he deems that it is because of its extreme vulnerability that community provides the focus of postmodern concerns in attracting so much intellectual and “real-world” attention (Bauman xxix). Most notably, and relevant to the phenomenon of the media craze, as discussed in this article, Bauman defines the imagined community by way of the cogito “I am seen, therefore I exist” (xix). Not only does Bauman’s line of thought explain the mass and media appeal of populist ideologies of postmodernity that strive to “fill the void”, like Sharon Blackie’s The Enchanted Life — Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday, or Mattie James’s acclaimed Everyday Magic: The Joy of Not Being Everything and Still Being More than Enough; it also illuminates the immense collective appeal of the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge. Here, Bauman’s thought on the power of shared experience — in this case, mass-mediated experience — is, again, of particular relevance: “having no other … anchors except the affections of their ‘members’, imagined communities exist solely through … occasional outbursts of togetherness” (xix). Among these, he lists “demonstrations, marches, festivals, riots” (xix). Indeed, the joyous shared expression of the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge videos posted online during the COVID-19 pandemic may well sort under similar festive public “outbursts”. As a ceremonial dance that tells the story of shared experiences and longings, Jerusalema may be seen as one such collective celebration. True to African dance tradition, more than being merely entertainment for the masses, each in its own way, the dance videos recount history, convey emotion, celebrate rites of passage, and help unify communities in one of the darkest periods of the recent global past. An Intertextual Context for Reading “Jerusalema” However, historical dimensions of the “Jerusalem trope” suggest that Jerusalema might also be understood from a more critical perspective. As Hees (92) notes, the trope of the loss of and longing for the city of Jerusalem represents a merging of mythologies through the ages, embodied in Hebrew, Roman, Christian, Muslim, and Zionist religious cultures. Still, many Jerusalem narratives refrain from referring to its historical legacy, which fuelled hostility between the West and the Muslim world still prevalent today. Thus, the historical realities of fraud, deceit, greed, betrayal, massacres, and even cannibalism are often shunned so that Jerusalem — one of the holiest yet most blood-soaked cities in the world (Hees 92, 95) — is elevated as a symbol of the Heavenly City. In this respect, the South African crime epic Gangster Paradise: Jerusalema, which premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2008 and was later submitted to the Academy Awards for consideration to qualify as a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film (De Jager), stands in stark contrast to the divine connotations of Master KG’s Jerusalema. According to its director Ralph Ziman (Stecker), the film, inspired by a true story, offers a raw look into post-apartheid crime and corruption in the South African city of Johannesburg (De Villiers 8). Its storyline provides a sharp critique of the economic inequalities that torment South Africa in post-apartheid democracy, capturing the dissatisfaction and the “wave of violent crimes that resulted from the economic realities at its root” (Azuawusiefe 102). The irony of the narrative resides in the fact that the main protagonist, Lucky Kunene, at first reluctant to resort to a life of crime, turns to car hijacking and then to hijacking derelict, over-crowded buildings in the inner-city centre of Hillbrow (Hees 90). Having become a wealthy crime boss, Johannesburg, for him, becomes symbolic of a New Jerusalem (“Jerusalem Entjha”; Azuawusiefe 103; Hees 91-92). Entangled in the criminal underbelly of the city and arrested for murder, Kunene escapes from prison, relocating to the coastal city of Durban where, again, he envisages “Jerusalem Enthjha” (which, supposedly, once more implies a life of crime). As a portrayal of inner-city life in Johannesburg, this narrative takes on particular relevance for the current state of affairs in the country. In September this year, an uncontainable fire at a derelict, overcrowded hijacked building owned by Johannesburg municipal authorities claimed the lives of 73 people — a tragic event reported on by all major TV networks worldwide. While the events and economic actualities pictured in the film thus offer a realistic view of the adversities of current South African life, visual content in Master KG’s Jerusalema sublimates everyday South African scenes. Though the deprivation, decay, and poverty among which the majority of South Africans live is acknowledged in the video, its message of a yearning for salvation and a “better home” is foregrounded while explicit critique is shunned. This means that Jerusalema’s plea for divine deliverance is marked by an ambivalence that may weaken an understanding of the video as “pure magic”. Fig. 2: Still from the video Jerusalema showing decrepit living conditions in the background. “Jerusalema” as Layers of Meaning From Bauman’s perspective, Jerusalema — both as a music video and the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge — may represent a more profound human longing for imagined communal celebration beyond mass-mediated entertainment. From such a viewpoint, it may be seen as one specific representation of the millennia-old trope of a heavenly, transcendent Jerusalem in the biblical tradition, the celestial city providing a dwelling for the divine to enter this world (Thompson 647). Nevertheless, in Patrick Curry’s terms, as a media frenzy, the song and its ensuing dance challenge may also be understood as “enchantment enslaved by magic”; that is, enchantment in the service of mass-mediated glamour (7). This implies that Jerusalema is not exempt from underlying ideologised conditions of production, or an endorsement of materialistic values. The video exhibits many of the characteristics of a prototypical music video that guarantee commercial success — a memorable song, the incorporation of noteworthy dance routines, the showcasing of a celebrated artist, striking relations between music and image, and flashy visuals, all of which are skilfully put together (compare Korsgaard). Auslander observes, for instance, that in current music video production the appearance and behaviour of artists are the basic units of communication from which genre-specific personae are constructed (100). In this regard, the setting of a video is crucial for ensuring coherence with the constructed persona (Vernallis 87). These aspects come to the fore in Master KG’s video rendition of Jerusalema. The vocalist Nomcebo Zikode is showcased in settings that serve as a favourable backdrop to the spiritual appeal of the lyrics, either by way of slightly filtered scenes of nature or scenes of worshippers or seekers of spiritual blessing. In addition, following the gospel genre type, her gestures often suggest divine adoration. Fig. 3: Vocalist Nomcebo Zikode in a still from the video Jerusalema. However, again some ambiguity of meaning may be noted. First, the fashionable outfits featured by the singer are in stark contrast with scenes of poverty and deprivation later in the video. The impression of affluence is strengthened by her stylish make-up and haircut and the fact that she changes into different outfits during the song. This points to a glamorisation of religious worship and an idealisation of township life that disregards South Africa’s dire economic situation, which existed even before COVID-19, due to massive corruption and state capture in which the African National Congress is fully implicated (Momoniat). Furthermore, according to media reportage, Jerusalema’s context of production was not without controversy. Though the video worked its magic in the hearts of millions of viewers and listeners worldwide, the song’s celebration as a global hit was marred by legal battles over copyright and remuneration issues. First, it came to light that singer-songwriter Nomcebo Zikode had for a considerable period not been paid for her contribution to the production following Jerusalema’s commercial release in 2019 (Modise). Therefore, she resorted to a legal dispute. Also, it was alleged that Master KG was not the original owner of the music and was not even present when the song was created. Thus, the South African artists Charmza The DJ (Presley Ledwaba) and Biblos (Ntimela Chauke), who claimed to be the original creators of the track, also instituted legal action against Kgaogelo Moagi, his record label Open Mic Productions, and distributor Africori SA whose majority shareholder is the Warner Music Group (Madibogo). The Magic of the Dance Despite these moral and material ambiguities, Jerusalema’s influence as a global cultural phenomenon during the era of COVID spoke to a more profound yearning for the human condition, one that was not necessarily based on religious conviction (Shoki). Perhaps this was vested foremost in the simplicity and authenticity that transpired from the original dance challenge video and its countless pursuals posted online at the time. These prohibit reading the Jerusalema phenomenon as pseudo-enchantment driven only by a profit motive. As a wholly unforeseen, unifying force of hope and joy, the dance challenge sparked a global trend that fostered optimism among millions. Fig. 4: The Angolan dance troupe Fenómenos do Semba. (Still from the original #JerusalemaDanceChallenge video.) As stated earlier, Jerusalema did not originate from political activism. Yet, Professor of English literature Ananya Kabir uncovers a layer of meaning associated with the dance challenge, which she calls “alegropolitics” or a “politics of joy” — the joy of the dance ­­— that she links on the one hand with the Jerusalem trope and its history of trauma and dehumanisation, and, on the other, with Afro-Atlantic expressive culture as associated with enslavement, colonialism, and commodification. In her reading of the countless videos posted, their “gift to the world” is “the secret of moving collectively”. By way of individual responses to “poly-rhythmic Africanist aesthetic principles … held together by a master-structure”, Kabir interprets this communal dance as “resistance, incorporating kinetic and rhythmic principles that circulated initially around the Atlantic rim (including the Americas, Europe, the Caribbean, and Africa)”. For her, the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge is “an example of how dance enables convivencia (living together)”; “it is a line dance (animation in French, animação in Portuguese, animación in Spanish) that enlivens parties through simple choreography that makes people dance together”. In this sense, the routine’s syncopated steps allow more and more people to join as each repetition unfolds — indeed, a celebratory example of Bauman’s imagined community that exists through an “outburst of togetherness” (xix). Such a collective “fest” demonstrates how, in dance leader Maiza’s words, “it is possible to be happy with little: we party with very little” (Kabir). Accordingly, as part of a globally mediated community, with just the resources of the body (Kabir), the locked-down world partied, too, for the duration of the magical song. Whether seen as a representation of the millennia-old trope of a heavenly, transcendent Jerusalem, or, in Curry’s understanding, as enchantment in the service of mass-mediated glamour, Jerusalema and its ensuing dance challenge form an undeniable part of recent global history involving the COVID-19 pandemic. As a media frenzy, it contributed to the existing body of “Jerusalem songs”, and lifted global spirits clouded by the pandemic and its emotional and material losses. Likewise, the #JerusalemaDanceChallenge was symbolic of an imagined global community engaging in “the joy of the dance” during one of the most challenging periods in humanity’s recent past. References Auslander, Philip. “Framing Personae in Music Videos.” The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis. Eds. Loria A. Burns and Stan Hawkins. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 92-109. Azuawusiefe, Chijioke. “Jerusalema: On Violence and Hope in a New South Africa.” The Nigerian Journal of Theology 34-36 (2020-2022): 101-112. Baumann, Zygmunt. Intimations of Postmodernity. New York: Routledge, 1992. Blackie, Sharon. The Enchanted Life – Unlocking the Magic of the Everyday. Oakfield, CI: September, 2018. Burns, Lori A., and Stan Hawkins, eds. Introduction. The Bloomsbury Handbook of Popular Music Video Analysis. London: Bloomsbury, 2019. 1-9. Chingono, Nyasha. “Jerusalema: Dance Craze Brings Hope from Africa to the World Amid Covid.” The Guardian 24 Sep. 2020. 30 June 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/24/jerusalema-dance-craze-brings-hope-from-africa-to-the-world-amid-covid>. ———. “‘I Haven’t Been Paid a Cent’: Jerusalema Singer’s Claim Stirs Row in South Africa.” The Guardian 13 July 2021. 15 July 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/jul/13/i-havent-been-paid-a-cent-jerusalema-singers-claim-stirs-row-in-south africa>. Curry, Patrick. “Magic vs. Enchantment.” Mallorn: The Journal of the Tolkien Society 38 (2001): 5-10. De Jager, Christelle. “Oscar Gets Trip to ‘Jerusalema’.” Variety 7 Oct. 2008. 8 July 2023 <https://variety.com/2008/film/awards/oscar-gets-trip-to-jerusalema-1117993596/>. Denselow, Robin. “Paul Simon's Graceland: The Acclaim and the Outrage.” The Guardian 19 Apr. 2012. 15 July 2023 <https://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/apr/19/paul-simon-graceland-acclaim-outrage>. De Villiers, Dawid W. “After the Revolution: Jerusalema and the Entrepreneurial Present.” South African Theatre Journal 23 (2009): 8-22. Hees, Edwin. “Jerusalema.” Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa 6.1 (2009): 89-99. <https://doi.org/10.2989/JMAA.2009.6.1.9.1061>. Hissong, Samantha. “How South Africa’s ‘Jerusalema’ Became a Global Hit without Ever Having to Be Translated.” Rolling Stone 16 Oct. 2020. 15 June 2023 <https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/news/jerusalema-global-dance-hit-south-africa-spotify-1076474/>. James, Mattie. Everyday Magic. The Joy of Not Being Everything and Still Being More than Enough. Franklin, Tennessee: Worthy Publishing, 2022. “Jerusalema Lyrics in English.” Afrika Lyrics 2019. 7 July 2023 <https://afrikalyrics.com/master-kg-jerusalema- translation>. Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “The Angolan Dancers Who Helped South African Anthem Jerusalema Go Global.” The Conversation 29 Oct. 2020. 30 June 2023 <https://theconversation.com/the-angolan-dancers-who-helped-south-african-anthem-jerusalema-go-global-148782>. Korsgaard, Mathias. Music Video after MTV: Audio-Visual Studies, New Media, and Popular Music. New York: Routledge, 2017. Madibogo, Julia. “Master KG Slapped with a Lawsuit for Jerusalema.” City Press 26 July 2022. 4 July 2023 <https://www.news24.com/citypress/trending/master-kg-slapped-with-a-lawsuit-for-jerusalema-20220726>. Modise, Julia Mantsali. “Jerusalema, a Heritage Day Song of the Covid-19 Pandemic.” Religions 14.45 (2022). 30 June 2023 <https//doi.org/10.3390/rel1401004>. Modise, Kedibone. “Nomcebo Zikode Reveals Ownership Drama over ‘Jerusalema’ Has Intensified.” IOL Entertainment 6 June 2022. 30 June 2023 <https://www.iol.co.za/entertainment/music/local/nomcebo-zikode-reveals-ownership-drama-over-jerusalema-has-intensified-211e2575-f0c6-43cc-8684-c672b9da4c04>. Momoniat, Ismail. “How and Why Did State Capture and Massive Corruption Occur in South Africa?”. IMF PFM Blog 10 Apr. 2023. 15 June 2023 <https://blog-pfm.imf.org/en/pfmblog/2023/04/how-and-why-did-state-capture-and-massive-corruption-occur-in-south-africa>. Ndzuta, Akhona. “How Viral Song Jerusalema Joined the Ranks of South Africa’s Greatest Hits.” The Conversation 29 Oct. 2020. 30 June 2023 <https://theconversation.com/how-viral-song-jerusalema-joined-the-ranks-of-south-africas-greatest-hits-148781>. Orange, B. Allen. “Ralph Ziman Talks Gangster's Paradise: Jerusalema [Exclusive].” Movieweb 2010. 15 July 2023 <https://movieweb.com/exclusive-ralph-ziman-talks-gangsters-paradise-jerusalema/>. Seroto, Butchie. “Amapiano: What Is It All About?” Music in Africa 30 Sep. 2020. 15 June 2023 <https://www.musicinafrica.net/magazine/amapiano-what-it-all-about>. Shoki, William. “‘Jerusalema’ Is about Self-Determination.” Jacobin 10 Dec. 2020. 30 June 2023 <https://jacobin.com/2020/10/jerusalema-south-africa-coronavirus-covid>. Stecker, Joshua. “Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalema – Q & A with Writer/Director Ralph Ziman.” Script 11 June 2010. 30 June 2023 <https://scriptmag.com/features/gangsters-paradise-jerusalema-qa-with-writerdirector-ralph-ziman>. Thompson, Thomas L. “Jerusalem as the City of God's Kingdom: Common Tropes in the Bible and the Ancient Near East.” Islamic Studies 40.3-4 (2001): 631-647. Vernallis, Carol. Experiencing Music Video: Aesthetics and Cultural Context. New York: Columbia UP, 2004. World Health Organisation. “The True Death Toll of Covid-19.” N.d. 15 July 2023 <https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality>.

The brand began, quite literally, as a method for ranchers to identify their cattle. By burning a distinct symbol into the hide of a baby calf, the owner could insure that if it one day wandered off his property or was stolen by a competitor, he’d be able to point to that logo and claim the animal as his rightful property. When the manufacturers of products adopted the brand as a way of guaranteeing the quality of their goods, its function remained pretty much the same. Buying a package of oats with the Quaker label meant the customer could trace back these otherwise generic oats to their source. If there was a problem, he knew where he could turn. More important, if the oats were of satisfactory or superior quality, he knew where he could get them again. Trademarking a brand meant that no one else could call his oats Quaker. Advertising in this innocent age simply meant publicizing the existence of one’s brand. The sole objective was to increase consumers awareness of the product or company that made it. Those who even thought to employ specialists for the exclusive purpose of writing ad copy hired newspaper reporters and travelling salesmen, who knew how to explain the attributes of an item in words that people tended to remember. It wasn’t until 1922 that a preacher and travelling “medicine show” salesman-turned-copywriter named Claude Hopkins decided that advertising should be systematized into a science. His short but groundbreaking book Scientific Advertising proposed that the advertisement is merely a printed extension of the salesman¹s pitch and should follow the same rules. Hopkins believed in using hard descriptions over hype, and text over image: “The more you tell, the more you sell” and “White space is wasted space” were his mantras. Hopkins believed that any illustrations used in an ad should be directly relevant to the product itself, not just a loose or emotional association. He insisted on avoiding “frivolity” at all costs, arguing that “no one ever bought from a clown.” Although some images did appear in advertisements and on packaging as early as the 1800s - the Quaker Oats man showed up in 1877 - these weren¹t consciously crafted to induce psychological states in customers. They were meant just to help people remember one brand over another. How better to recall the brand Quaker than to see a picture of one? It wasn’t until the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as Americans turned toward movies and television and away from newspapers and radio, that advertisers’ focus shifted away from describing their brands and to creating images for them. During these decades, Midwestern adman Leo Burnett concocted what is often called the Chicago school of advertising, in which lovable characters are used to represent products. Green Giant, which was originally just the Minnesota Valley Canning Company’s code name for an experimental pea, became the Jolly Green Giant in young Burnett’s world of animated characters. He understood that the figure would make a perfect and enticing brand image for an otherwise boring product and could also serve as a mnemonic device for consumers. As he watched his character grow in popularity, Burnett discovered that the mythical figure of a green giant had resonance in many different cultures around the world. It became a kind of archetype and managed to penetrate the psyche in more ways than one. Burnett was responsible for dozens of character-based brand images, including Tony the Tiger, Charlie the Tuna, Morris the Cat, and the Marlboro Man. In each case, the character creates a sense of drama, which engages the audience in the pitch. This was Burnett’s great insight. He still wanted to sell a product based on its attributes, but he knew he had to draw in his audience using characters. Brand images were also based on places, like Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing, or on recognizable situations, such as the significant childhood memories labelled “Kodak moments” or a mother nurturing her son on a cold day, a defining image for Campbell’s soup. In all these cases, however, the moment, location, or character went only so far as to draw the audience into the ad, after which they would be subjected to a standard pitch: ‘Soup is good food’, or ‘Sorry, Charlie, only the best tuna get to be Starkist’. Burnett saw himself as a homespun Midwesterner who was contributing to American folklore while speaking in the plain language of the people. He took pride in the fact that his ads used words like “ain’t”; not because they had some calculated psychological effect on the audience, but because they communicated in a natural, plainspoken style. As these methods found their way to Madison Avenue and came to be practiced much more self-consciously, Burnett¹s love for American values and his focus on brand attributes were left behind. Branding became much more ethereal and image-based, and ads only occasionally nodded to a product’s attributes. In the 1960s, advertising gurus like David Ogilvy came up with rules about television advertising that would have made Claude Hopkins shudder. “Food in motion” dictated that food should always be shot by a moving camera. “Open with fire” meant that ads should start in a very exciting and captivating way. Ogilvy told his creatives to use supers - text superimposed on the screen to emphasize important phrases and taglines. All these techniques were devised to promote brand image, not the product. Ogilvy didn’t believe consumers could distinguish between products were it not for their images. In Ogilvy on Advertising, he explains that most people cannot tell the difference between their own “favourite” whiskey and the closest two competitors’: ‘Have they tried all three and compared the taste? Don¹t make me laugh. The reality is that these three brands have different images which appeal to different kinds of people. It isn¹t the whiskey they choose, it’s the image. The brand image is ninety percent of what the distiller has to sell.’ (Ogilvy, 1993). Thus, we learned to “trust our car to the man who wears the star” not because Texaco had better gasoline than Shell, but because the company’s advertisers had created a better brand image. While Burnett and his disciples were building brand myths, another school of advertisers was busy learning about its audience. Back in the 1920s, Raymond Rubicam, who eventually founded the agency Young and Rubicam, thought it might be interesting to hire a pollster named Dr. Gallup from Northwestern University to see what could be gleaned about consumers from a little market research. The advertising industry’s version of cultural anthropology, or demographics, was born. Like the public-relations experts who study their target populations in order to manipulate them later, marketers began conducting polls, market surveys, and focus groups on the segments of the population they hoped to influence. And to draw clear, clean lines between demographic groups, researchers must almost always base distinctions on four factors: race, age, sex, and wages. Demographic research is reductionist by design. I once consulted to an FM radio station whose station manager wanted to know, “Who is our listener?” Asking such a question reduces an entire listenership down to one fictional person. It’s possible that no single individual will ever match the “customer profile” meant to apply to all customers, which is why so much targeted marketing often borders on classist, racist, and sexist pandering. Billboards for most menthol cigarettes, for example, picture African-Americans because, according to demographic research, black people prefer them to regular cigarettes. Microsoft chose Rolling Stones songs to launch Windows 95, a product targeted at wealthy baby boomers. “The Women’s Global Challenge” was an advertising-industry-created Olympics for women, with no purpose other than to market to active females. By the 1970s, the two strands of advertising theory - demographic research and brand image - were combined to develop campaigns that work on both levels. To this day, we know to associate Volvos with safety, Dr. Pepper with individuality, and Harley-Davidson with American heritage. Each of these brand images is crafted to appeal to the target consumer’s underlying psychological needs: Volvo ads are aimed at upper-middle-class white parents who fear for their children’s health and security, Dr. Pepper is directed to young nonconformists, and the Harley-Davidson image supports its riders’ self-perception as renegades. Today’s modern (or perhaps postmodern) brands don’t invent a corporate image on their own; they appropriate one from the media itself, such as MetLife did with Snoopy, Butterfinger did with Bart Simpson, or Kmart did by hiring Penny Marshall and Rosie O’Donnell. These mascots were selected because their perceived characteristics match the values of their target consumers - not the products themselves. In the language of today’s marketers, brand images do not reflect on products but on advertisers’ perceptions of their audiences’ psychology. This focus on audience composition and values has become the standard operating procedure in all of broadcasting. When Fox TV executives learned that their animated series “King of the Hill”, about a Texan propane distributor, was not faring well with certain demographics, for example, they took a targeted approach to their character’s rehabilitation. The Brandweek piece on Fox’s ethnic campaign uncomfortably dances around the issue. Hank Hill is the proverbial everyman, and Fox wants viewers to get comfortable with him; especially viewers in New York, where “King of the Hill”’s homespun humor hasn’t quite caught on with the young urbanites. So far this season, the show has pulled in a 10.1 rating/15 share in households nationally, while garnering a 7.9 rating/12 share in New York (Brandweek, 1997) As far as Fox was concerned, while regular people could identify with the network’s new “everyman” character, New Yorkers weren’t buying his middle-American patter. The television show’s ratings proved what TV executives had known all along: that New York City’s Jewish demographic doesn’t see itself as part of the rest of America. Fox’s strategy for “humanizing” the character to those irascible urbanites was to target the group’s ethnographic self-image. Fox put ads for the show on the panels of sidewalk coffee wagons throughout Manhattan, with the tagline “Have a bagel with Hank”. In an appeal to the target market’s well-developed (and well-researched) cynicism, Hank himself is shown saying, “May I suggest you have that with a schmear”. The disarmingly ethnic humor here is meant to underscore the absurdity of a Texas propane salesman using a Jewish insider’s word like “schmear.” In another Upper West Side billboard, Hank’s son appeals to the passing traffic: “Hey yo! Somebody toss me up a knish!” As far as the New York demographic is concerned, these jokes transform the characters from potentially threatening Southern rednecks into loveable hicks bending over backward to appeal to Jewish sensibilities, and doing so with a comic and, most important, nonthreatening inadequacy. Today, the most intensely targeted demographic is the baby - the future consumer. Before an average American child is twenty months old, he can recognize the McDonald’s logo and many other branded icons. Nearly everything a toddler encounters - from Band-Aids to underpants - features the trademarked characters of Disney or other marketing empires. Although this target market may not be in a position to exercise its preferences for many years, it pays for marketers to imprint their brands early. General Motors bought a two-page ad in Sports Illustrated for Kids for its Chevy Venture minivan. Their brand manager rationalized that the eight-to-fourteen-year-old demographic consists of “back-seat consumers” (Leonhardt, 1997). The real intention of target marketing to children and babies, however, goes deeper. The fresh neurons of young brains are valuable mental real estate to admen. By seeding their products and images early, the marketers can do more than just develop brand recognition; they can literally cultivate a demographic’s sensibilities as they are formed. A nine-year-old child who can recognize the Budweiser frogs and recite their slogan (Bud-weis-er) is more likely to start drinking beer than one who can remember only Tony the Tiger yelling, “They¹re great!” (Currently, more children recognize the frogs than Tony.) This indicates a long-term coercive strategy. The abstraction of brand images from the products they represent, combined with an increasing assault on our demographically targeted psychological profiles, led to some justifiable consumer paranoia by the 1970s. Advertising was working on us in ways we couldn’t fully understand, and people began to look for an explanation. In 1973, Wilson Bryan Key, a communications researcher, wrote the first of four books about “subliminal advertising,” in which he accused advertisers of hiding sexual imagery in ice cubes, and psychoactive words like “sex” onto the airbrushed surfaces of fashion photographs. Having worked on many advertising campaigns from start to finish, in close proximity to everyone from copywriters and art directors to printers, I can comfortably put to rest any rumours that major advertising agencies are engaging in subliminal campaigns. How do images that could be interpreted as “sexual” show up in ice cubes or elbows? The final photographs chosen for ads are selected by committee out of hundreds that are actually shot. After hours or days of consideration, the group eventually feels drawn to one or two photos out of the batch. Not surprising, these photos tend to have more evocative compositions and details, but no penises, breasts, or skulls are ever superimposed onto the images. In fact, the man who claims to have developed subliminal persuasion, James Vicary, admitted to Advertising Age in 1984 that he had fabricated his evidence that the technique worked in order to drum up business for his failing research company. But this confession has not assuaged Key and others who relentlessly, perhaps obsessively, continue to pursue those they feel are planting secret visual messages in advertisements. To be fair to Key, advertisers have left themselves open to suspicion by relegating their work to the abstract world of the image and then targeting consumer psychology so deliberately. According to research by the Roper Organization in 1992, fifty-seven percent of American consumers still believe that subliminal advertising is practiced on a regular basis, and only one in twelve think it “almost never” happens. To protect themselves from the techniques they believe are being used against them, the advertising audience has adopted a stance of cynical suspicion. To combat our increasing awareness and suspicion of demographic targeting, marketers have developed a more camouflaged form of categorization based on psychological profiles instead of race and age. Jim Schroer, the executive director of new marketing strategy at Ford explains his abandonment of broad-demographic targeting: ‘It’s smarter to think about emotions and attitudes, which all go under the term: psychographics - those things that can transcend demographic groups.’ (Schroer, 1997) Instead, he now appeals to what he calls “consumers’ images of themselves.” Unlike broad demographics, the psychographic is developed using more narrowly structured qualitative-analysis techniques, like focus groups, in-depth interviews, and even home surveillance. Marketing analysts observe the behaviors of volunteer subjects, ask questions, and try to draw causal links between feelings, self-image, and purchases. A company called Strategic Directions Group provides just such analysis of the human psyche. In their study of the car-buying habits of the forty-plus baby boomers and their elders, they sought to define the main psychological predilections that human beings in this age group have regarding car purchases. Although they began with a demographic subset of the overall population, their analysis led them to segment the group into psychographic types. For example, members of one psychographic segment, called the ³Reliables,² think of driving as a way to get from point A to point B. The “Everyday People” campaign for Toyota is aimed at this group and features people depending on their reliable and efficient little Toyotas. A convertible Saab, on the other hand, appeals to the ³Stylish Fun² category, who like trendy and fun-to-drive imports. One of the company’s commercials shows a woman at a boring party fantasizing herself into an oil painting, where she drives along the canvas in a sporty yellow Saab. Psychographic targeting is more effective than demographic targeting because it reaches for an individual customer more directly - like a fly fisherman who sets bait and jiggles his rod in a prescribed pattern for a particular kind of fish. It’s as if a marketing campaign has singled you out and recognizes your core values and aspirations, without having lumped you into a racial or economic stereotype. It amounts to a game of cat-and-mouse between advertisers and their target psychographic groups. The more effort we expend to escape categorization, the more ruthlessly the marketers pursue us. In some cases, in fact, our psychographic profiles are based more on the extent to which we try to avoid marketers than on our fundamental goals or values. The so-called “Generation X” adopted the anti-chic aesthetic of thrift-store grunge in an effort to find a style that could not be so easily identified and exploited. Grunge was so self-consciously lowbrow and nonaspirational that it seemed, at first, impervious to the hype and glamour normally applied swiftly to any emerging trend. But sure enough, grunge anthems found their way onto the soundtracks of television commercials, and Dodge Neons were hawked by kids in flannel shirts saying “Whatever.” The members of Generation X are putting up a good fight. Having already developed an awareness of how marketers attempt to target their hearts and wallets, they use their insight into programming to resist these attacks. Unlike the adult marketers pursuing them, young people have grown up immersed in the language of advertising and public relations. They speak it like natives. As a result, they are more than aware when a commercial or billboard is targeting them. In conscious defiance of demographic-based pandering, they adopt a stance of self-protective irony‹distancing themselves from the emotional ploys of the advertisers. Lorraine Ketch, the director of planning in charge of Levi¹s trendy Silvertab line, explained, “This audience hates marketing that’s in your face. It eyeballs it a mile away, chews it up and spits it out” (On Advertising, 1998). Chiat/Day, one of the world’s best-known and experimental advertising agencies, found the answer to the crisis was simply to break up the Gen-X demographic into separate “tribes” or subdemographics - and include subtle visual references to each one of them in the ads they produce for the brand. According to Levi’s director of consumer marketing, the campaign meant to communicate, “We really understand them, but we are not trying too hard” (On Advertising, 1998). Probably unintentionally, Ms. Ketch has revealed the new, even more highly abstract plane on which advertising is now being communicated. Instead of creating and marketing a brand image, advertisers are creating marketing campaigns about the advertising itself. Silvertab’s target market is supposed to feel good about being understood, but even better about understanding the way they are being marketed to. The “drama” invented by Leo Burnett and refined by David Ogilvy and others has become a play within a play. The scene itself has shifted. The dramatic action no longer occurs between the audience and the product, the brand, or the brand image, but between the audience and the brand marketers. As audiences gain even more control over the media in which these interactive stories unfold, advertising evolves ever closer to a theatre of the absurd. excerpted from Coercion: Why We Listen to What "They" Say)? Works Cited Ogilvy, David. Ogilvy on Advertising. New York: Vintage, 1983. Brandweek Staff, "Number Crunching, Hollywood Style," Brandweek. October 6, 1997. Leonhardt, David, and Kathleen Kerwin, "Hey Kid, Buy This!" Business Week. June 30, 1997 Schroer, Jim. Quoted in "Why We Kick Tires," by Carol Morgan and Doron Levy. Brandweek. Sept 29, 1997. "On Advertising," The New York Times. August 14, 1998 Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Rushkoff, Douglas. "Coercion " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>. APA Style Rushkoff, D. (2003, Jun 19). Coercion . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0306/06-coercion.php>

IntroductionThe Internet (especially in the so-called Web 2.0 phase), digital media and file-sharing networks have thrust copyright law under public scrutiny, provoking discourses questioning what is fair in the digital age. Accessible hardware and software has led to prosumerism – creativity blending media consumption with media production to create new works that are freely disseminated online via popular video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube or genre specific music sites like GYBO (“Get Your Bootleg On”) amongst many others. The term “prosumer” is older than the Web, and the conceptual convergence of producer and consumer roles is certainly not new, for “at electric speeds the consumer becomes producer as the public becomes participant role player” (McLuhan 4). Similarly, Toffler’s “Third Wave” challenges “old power relationships” and promises to “heal the historic breach between producer and consumer, giving rise to the ‘prosumer’ economics” (27). Prosumption blurs the traditionally separate consumer and producer creating a new creative era of mass customisation of artefacts culled from the (copyrighted) media landscape (Tapscott 62-3). Simultaneously, corporate interests dependent upon the protections provided by copyright law lobby for augmented rights and actively defend their intellectual property through law suits, takedown notices and technological reinforcement. Despite a lack demonstrable economic harm in many cases, the propertarian approach is winning and frequently leading to absurd results (Collins).The balance between private and public interests in creative works is facilitated by the doctrine of fair use (as codified in the United States Copyright Act 1976, section 107). The majority of copyright laws contain “fair” exceptions to claims of infringement, but fair use is characterised by a flexible, open-ended approach that allows the law to flex with the times. Until recently the defence was unique to the U.S., but on 2 January Israel amended its copyright laws to include a fair use defence. (For an overview of the new Israeli fair use exception, see Efroni.) Despite its flexibility, fair use has been systematically eroded by ever encroaching copyrights. This paper argues that copyright enforcement has spun out of control and the raison d’être of the law has shifted from being “an engine of free expression” (Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985)) towards a “legal regime for intellectual property that increasingly looks like the law of real property, or more properly an idealized construct of that law, one in which courts seeks out and punish virtually any use of an intellectual property right by another” (Lemley 1032). Although the copyright landscape appears bleak, two recent cases suggest that fair use has not fallen by the wayside and may well recover. This paper situates fair use as an essential legal and cultural mechanism for optimising creative expression.A Brief History of CopyrightThe law of copyright extends back to eighteenth century England when the Statute of Anne (1710) was enacted. Whilst the length of this paper precludes an in depth analysis of the law and its export to the U.S., it is important to stress the goals of copyright. “Copyright in the American tradition was not meant to be a “property right” as the public generally understands property. It was originally a narrow federal policy that granted a limited trade monopoly in exchange for universal use and access” (Vaidhyanathan 11). Copyright was designed as a right limited in scope and duration to ensure that culturally important creative works were not the victims of monopolies and were free (as later mandated in the U.S. Constitution) “to promote the progress.” During the 18th century English copyright discourse Lord Camden warned against propertarian approaches lest “all our learning will be locked up in the hands of the Tonsons and the Lintons of the age, who will set what price upon it their avarice chooses to demand, till the public become as much their slaves, as their own hackney compilers are” (Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 1000). Camden’s sentiments found favour in subsequent years with members of the North American judiciary reiterating that copyright was a limited right in the interests of society—the law’s primary beneficiary (see for example, Wheaton v. Peters 33 US 591 [1834]; Fox Film Corporation v. Doyal 286 US 123 [1932]; US v. Paramount Pictures 334 US 131 [1948]; Mazer v. Stein 347 US 201, 219 [1954]; Twentieth Century Music Corp. v. Aitken 422 U.S. 151 [1975]; Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. 440 US 257 [1979]; Dowling v. United States 473 US 207 [1985]; Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enterprises 471 U.S. 539 [1985]; Luther R. Campbell a.k.a. Luke Skyywalker, et al. v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. 510 U.S 569 [1994]). Putting the “Fair” in Fair UseIn Folsom v. Marsh 9 F. Cas. 342 (C.C.D. Mass. 1841) (No. 4,901) Justice Storey formulated the modern shape of fair use from a wealth of case law extending back to 1740 and across the Atlantic. Over the course of one hundred years the English judiciary developed a relatively cohesive set of principles governing the use of a first author’s work by a subsequent author without consent. Storey’s synthesis of these principles proved so comprehensive that later English courts would look to his decision for guidance (Scott v. Stanford L.R. 3 Eq. 718, 722 (1867)). Patry explains fair use as integral to the social utility of copyright to “encourage. . . learned men to compose and write useful books” by allowing a second author to use, under certain circumstances, a portion of a prior author’s work, where the second author would himself produce a work promoting the goals of copyright (Patry 4-5).Fair use is a safety valve on copyright law to prevent oppressive monopolies, but some scholars suggest that fair use is less a defence and more a right that subordinates copyrights. Lange and Lange Anderson argue that the doctrine is not fundamentally about copyright or a system of property, but is rather concerned with the recognition of the public domain and its preservation from the ever encroaching advances of copyright (2001). Fair use should not be understood as subordinate to the exclusive rights of copyright owners. Rather, as Lange and Lange Anderson claim, the doctrine should stand in the superior position: the complete spectrum of ownership through copyright can only be determined pursuant to a consideration of what is required by fair use (Lange and Lange Anderson 19). The language of section 107 suggests that fair use is not subordinate to the bundle of rights enjoyed by copyright ownership: “Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work . . . is not an infringement of copyright” (Copyright Act 1976, s.107). Fair use is not merely about the marketplace for copyright works; it is concerned with what Weinreb refers to as “a community’s established practices and understandings” (1151-2). This argument boldly suggests that judicial application of fair use has consistently erred through subordinating the doctrine to copyright and considering simply the effect of the appropriation on the market place for the original work.The emphasis on economic factors has led courts to sympathise with copyright owners leading to a propertarian or Blackstonian approach to copyright (Collins; Travis) propagating the myth that any use of copyrighted materials must be licensed. Law and media reports alike are potted with examples. For example, in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004) a Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that the transformative use of a three-note guitar sample infringed copyrights and that musicians must obtain licence from copyright owners for every appropriated audio fragment regardless of duration or recognisability. Similarly, in 2006 Christopher Knight self-produced a one-minute television advertisement to support his campaign to be elected to the board of education for Rockingham County, North Carolina. As a fan of Star Wars, Knight used a makeshift Death Star and lightsaber in his clip, capitalising on the imagery of the Jedi Knight opposing the oppressive regime of the Empire to protect the people. According to an interview in The Register the advertisement was well received by local audiences prompting Knight to upload it to his YouTube channel. Several months later, Knight’s clip appeared on Web Junk 2.0, a cable show broadcast by VH1, a channel owned by media conglomerate Viacom. Although his permission was not sought, Knight was pleased with the exposure, after all “how often does a local school board ad wind up on VH1?” (Metz). Uploading the segment of Web Junk 2.0 featuring the advertisement to YouTube, however, led Viacom to quickly issue a take-down notice citing copyright infringement. Knight expressed his confusion at the apparent unfairness of the situation: “Viacom says that I can’t use my clip showing my commercial, claiming copy infringement? As we say in the South, that’s ass-backwards” (Metz).The current state of copyright law is, as Patry says, “depressing”:We are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage ... things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners. Like Humpty-Dumpty, the copyright law we used to know can never be put back together.The erosion of fair use by encroaching private interests represented by copyrights has led to strong critiques leveled at the judiciary and legislators by Lessig, McLeod and Vaidhyanathan. “Free culture” proponents warn that an overly strict copyright regime unbalanced by an equally prevalent fair use doctrine is dangerous to creativity, innovation, culture and democracy. After all, “few, if any, things ... are strictly original throughout. Every book in literature, science and art, borrows, and must necessarily borrow, and use much which was well known and used before. No man creates a new language for himself, at least if he be a wise man, in writing a book. He contents himself with the use of language already known and used and understood by others” (Emerson v. Davis, 8 F. Cas. 615, 619 (No. 4,436) (CCD Mass. 1845), qted in Campbell v. Acuff-Rose, 62 U.S.L.W. at 4171 (1994)). The rise of the Web 2.0 phase with its emphasis on end-user created content has led to an unrelenting wave of creativity, and much of it incorporates or “mashes up” copyright material. As Negativland observes, free appropriation is “inevitable when a population bombarded with electronic media meets the hardware [and software] that encourages them to capture it” and creatively express themselves through appropriated media forms (251). The current state of copyright and fair use is bleak, but not beyond recovery. Two recent cases suggest a resurgence of the ideology underpinning the doctrine of fair use and the role played by copyright.Let’s Go CrazyIn “Let’s Go Crazy #1” on YouTube, Holden Lenz (then eighteen months old) is caught bopping to a barely recognizable recording of Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” in his mother’s Pennsylvanian kitchen. The twenty-nine second long video was viewed a mere twenty-eight times by family and friends before Stephanie Lenz received an email from YouTube informing her of its compliance with a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) take-down notice issued by Universal, copyright owners of Prince’s recording (McDonald). Lenz has since filed a counterclaim against Universal and YouTube has reinstated the video. Ironically, the media exposure surrounding Lenz’s situation has led to the video being viewed 633,560 times at the time of writing. Comments associated with the video indicate a less than reverential opinion of Prince and Universal and support the fairness of using the song. On 8 Aug. 2008 a Californian District Court denied Universal’s motion to dismiss Lenz’s counterclaim. The question at the centre of the court judgment was whether copyright owners should consider “the fair use doctrine in formulating a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.” The court ultimately found in favour of Lenz and also reaffirmed the position of fair use in relation to copyright. Universal rested its argument on two key points. First, that copyright owners cannot be expected to consider fair use prior to issuing takedown notices because fair use is a defence, invoked after the act rather than a use authorized by the copyright owner or the law. Second, because the DMCA does not mention fair use, then there should be no requirement to consider it, or at the very least, it should not be considered until it is raised in legal defence.In rejecting both arguments the court accepted Lenz’s argument that fair use is an authorised use of copyrighted materials because the doctrine of fair use is embedded into the Copyright Act 1976. The court substantiated the point by emphasising the language of section 107. Although fair use is absent from the DMCA, the court reiterated that it is part of the Copyright Act and that “notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A” a fair use “is not an infringement of copyright” (s.107, Copyright Act 1976). Overzealous rights holders frequently abuse the DMCA as a means to quash all use of copyrighted materials without considering fair use. This decision reaffirms that fair use “should not be considered a bizarre, occasionally tolerated departure from the grand conception of the copyright design” but something that it is integral to the constitution of copyright law and essential in ensuring that copyright’s goals can be fulfilled (Leval 1100). Unlicensed musical sampling has never fared well in the courtroom. Three decades of rejection and admonishment by judges culminated in Bridgeport Music, Inc., et al v. Dimension Films et al 383 F. 3d 400 (6th Cir. 2004): “Get a license or do not sample. We do not see this stifling creativity in any significant way” was the ruling on an action brought against an unlicensed use of a three-note guitar sample under section 114, an audio piracy provision. The Bridgeport decision sounded a death knell for unlicensed sampling, ensuring that only artists with sufficient capital to pay the piper could legitimately be creative with the wealth of recorded music available. The cost of licensing samples can often outweigh the creative merit of the act itself as discussed by McLeod (86) and Beaujon (25). In August 2008 the Supreme Court of New York heard EMI v. Premise Media in which EMI sought an injunction against an unlicensed fifteen second excerpt of John Lennon’s “Imagine” featured in Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, a controversial documentary canvassing alleged chilling of intelligent design proponents in academic circles. (The family of John Lennon and EMI had previously failed to persuade a Manhattan federal court in a similar action.) The court upheld Premise Media’s arguments for fair use and rejected the Bridgeport approach on which EMI had rested its entire complaint. Justice Lowe criticised the Bridgeport court for its failure to examine the legislative intent of section 114 suggesting that courts should look to the black letter of the law rather than blindly accept propertarian arguments. This decision is of particular importance because it establishes that fair use applies to unlicensed use of sound recordings and re-establishes de minimis use.ConclusionThis paper was partly inspired by the final entry on eminent copyright scholar William Patry’s personal copyright law blog (1 Aug. 2008). A copyright lawyer for over 25 years, Patry articulated his belief that copyright law has swung too far away from its initial objectives and that balance could never be restored. The two cases presented in this paper demonstrate that fair use – and therefore balance – can be recovered in copyright. The federal Supreme Court and lower courts have stressed that copyright was intended to promote creativity and have upheld the fair doctrine, but in order for the balance to exist in copyright law, cases must come before the courts; copyright myth must be challenged. As McLeod states, “the real-world problems occur when institutions that actually have the resources to defend themselves against unwarranted or frivolous lawsuits choose to take the safe route, thus eroding fair use”(146-7). ReferencesBeaujon, Andrew. “It’s Not the Beat, It’s the Mocean.” CMJ New Music Monthly. April 1999.Collins, Steve. “Good Copy, Bad Copy: Covers, Sampling and Copyright.” M/C Journal 8.3 (2005). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0507/02-collins.php›.———. “‘Property Talk’ and the Revival of Blackstonian Copyright.” M/C Journal 9.4 (2006). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0609/5-collins.php›.Donaldson v. Becket 17 Cobbett Parliamentary History, col. 953.Efroni, Zohar. “Israel’s Fair Use.” The Center for Internet and Society (2008). 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/5670›.Lange, David, and Jennifer Lange Anderson. “Copyright, Fair Use and Transformative Critical Appropriation.” Conference on the Public Domain, Duke Law School. 2001. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.law.duke.edu/pd/papers/langeand.pdf›.Lemley, Mark. “Property, Intellectual Property, and Free Riding.” Texas Law Review 83 (2005): 1031.Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas. New York: Random House, 2001.———. Free Culture. New York: Penguin, 2004.Leval, Pierre. “Toward a Fair Use Standard.” Harvard Law Review 103 (1990): 1105.McDonald, Heather. “Holden Lenz, 18 Months, versus Prince and Universal Music Group.” About.com: Music Careers 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://musicians.about.com/b/2007/10/27/holden-lenz-18-months-versus-prince-and-universal-music-group.htm›.McLeod, Kembrew. “How Copyright Law Changed Hip Hop: An interview with Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Hank Shocklee.” Stay Free 2002. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/20/public_enemy.html›.———. Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity. United States: Doubleday, 2005.McLuhan, Marshall, and Barrington Nevitt. Take Today: The Executive as Dropout. Ontario: Longman Canada, 1972.Metz, Cade. “Viacom Slaps YouTuber for Behaving like Viacom.” The Register 2007. 26 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/30/viacom_slaps_pol/›.Negativland, ed. Fair Use: The Story of the Letter U and the Numeral 2. Concord: Seeland, 1995.Patry, William. The Fair Use Privilege in Copyright Law. Washington DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1985.———. “End of the Blog.” The Patry Copyright Blog. 1 Aug. 2008. 27 Aug. 2008 ‹http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2008/08/end-of-blog.html›.Tapscott, Don. The Digital Economy: Promise and Peril in the Age of Networked Intelligence. New York: McGraw Hill, 1996.Toffler, Alvin. The Third Wave. London, Glasgow, Sydney, Auckland. Toronto, Johannesburg: William Collins, 1980.Travis, Hannibal. “Pirates of the Information Infrastructure: Blackstonian Copyright and the First Amendment.” Berkeley Technology Law Journal, Vol. 15 (2000), No. 777.Vaidhyanathan, Siva. Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity. New York; London: New York UP, 2003.

Neil Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto (2005) reconceives transience and domesticity together. This queer Irish road film collapses opposition between mobility and home by uncoupling them from heteronormative structures of gender, desire, and space—male/female, public/private. The film’s protagonist, Patrick “Kitten” Braden (Cillian Murphy), wanders in search of a loved one without whom she does not feel at home. Along the way, the film exposes and exploits the doubleness of both “mobility” and “home” in the traditional road narrative, queering the conventions of the road film to convey the desire and possibilities for an alternative domesticity. In its rerouting of the traditional road plot, Breakfast on Pluto does not follow a hero escaping the obligations of home and family to find autonomy on the road. Instead, the film charts Kitten’s quest to realise a sense of home through trans-domesticity—that is, to find shelter in non-heteronormative, mutual care while in both transient and public spaces.I affix “trans-” to “domesticity” to signal both the queerness and mobility that transform understandings of domestic spaces and practices in Breakfast on Pluto. To clarify, trans-domesticity is not queer assimilation to heteronormative domesticity, nor is it a relegation of queer culture to privatised and demobilised spaces. Rather, trans-domesticity challenges the assumption that all forms of domesticity are inherently normalising and demobilising. In other words, trans-domesticity uncovers tensions and violence swept under the rugs of hegemonic domesticity. Moreover, this alternative domesticity moves between and beyond the terms of gender and spatial oppositions that delimit the normative home.Specifically, “trans-domesticity” names non-normative homemaking practices that arise out of the “desire to feel at home”, a desire that Anne-Marie Fortier identifies in queer diasporic narratives (1890-90). Accordingly, “trans-domesticity” also registers the affective processes that foster the connectedness and belonging of “home” away from private domestic spaces and places of origin, a “rethinking of the concept of home”, which Ed Madden traces in lesbian and gay migrant narratives (175-77). Building on the assumption of queer diaspora theorists “that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very own home” (Rapport and Dawson 27), trans-domesticity focuses critical attention on the everyday practices and emotional labour that create a home in transience.As Breakfast on Pluto tracks its transgender protagonist’s movement between a small Irish border town, Northern Ireland, and London, the film invokes both a specifically Irish migration and the broader queer diaspora of which it is a part. While trans-domesticity is a recurring theme across a wide range of queer diasporic narratives, in Breakfast on Pluto it also simultaneously drives the plot and functions as a narrative frame. The film begins and ends with Kitten telling her story as she wanders through the streets of Soho and cares for a member of her made family, her friend Charlie’s baby.Although I am concerned with the film adaptation, Patrick McCabe’s “Prelude” to his novel, Breakfast on Pluto (1998), offers a useful point of departure: Patrick “Pussy” Braden’s dream, “as he negotiates the minefields of this world”, is “ending, once and for all, this ugly state of perpetual limbo” and “finding a map which might lead to that place called home” (McCabe x). In such a place, McCabe’s hero might lay “his head beneath a flower-bordered print that bears the words at last ‘You’re home’”(McCabe xi). By contrast, the film posits that “home” is never a “place” apart from “the minefields of this world”, and that while being in transit and in limbo might be a perpetual state, it is not necessarily an ugly one.Jordan’s film thus addresses the same questions as does Susan Fraiman in her book Extreme Domesticity: “But what about those for whom dislocation is not back story but main event? Those who, having pulled themselves apart, realize no timely arrival at a place of their own, so that being not-unpacked is an ongoing condition?” (155). Through her trans-domestic shelter-making and caregiving practices, Kitten enacts “home” in motion and in public spaces, and thereby realises the elision in the flower-bordered print in McCabe’s “Prelude” (xi), which does not assure “You are at home” but, rather, “You are home”.From Housed to Trans-Domestic SubjectivitySelf and home are equated in the dominant cultural narratives of Western modernity, but “home” in such formulations is assumed to be a self-owned, self-contained space. Psychoanalytic theorist Carl Jung describes this Ur-house as “a concretization of the individuation process, […] a symbol of psychic wholeness” (225). Philosopher Gaston Bachelard sees in the home “the topography of our intimate being”, a structure that “concentrates being within limits that protect” (xxxii). However, as historian Carolyn Steedman suggests, the mythic house that has become “the stuff of our ‘cultural psychology,’ the system of everyday metaphors by which we see ourselves”, is far from universal; rather, it reflects “the topography of the houses” of those who stand “in a central relationship to the dominant culture” (75, 17).For others, the lack of such housing correlates with political marginalisation, as the house functions as both a metaphor and material marker for culturally-recognised selfhood. As cultural geographer John Agnew argues, in capitalist societies the self-owned home is both a sign of autonomous individuality and a prerequisite for full political subjectivity (60). Philosopher Rosi Braidotti asserts that this figuration of subjectivity in “the phallo-Eurocentric master code” treats as “disposable” the “bodies of women, youth, and others who are racialised or marked off by age, gender, sexuality, and income” (6). These bodies are “reduced to marginality” and subsequently “experience dispossession of their embodied and embedded selves, in a political economy of repeated and structurally enforced eviction” (Braidotti 6).To shift the meaning of “home” and the intimately-linked “self” from a privately-owned, autonomous structure to trans-domesticity, to an ethos of care enacted even, and especially in, transient and public spaces, is not to romanticise homelessness or to deny the urgent necessity of material shelter. Breakfast on Pluto certainly does not allow viewers to do either. Rather, the figure of a trans-domestic self, like Braidotti’s “nomadic subject”, has the potential to challenge and transform the terms of power relations. Those now on the margins might then be seen as equally-embodied selves and full political subjects with the right to shelter and care.Such a political project also entails recognising and revaluing—without appropriating and demobilising—existing trans-domesticity. As Fraiman argues, “domesticity” must be “map[ped] from the margins” in order to include the homemaking practices of gender rebels and the precariously housed, of castaways and outcasts (4-5). This alternative map would allow “outsiders to normative domesticity” to “claim domesticity while wrenching it away from such things as compulsory heterosexuality […] and the illusion of a safely barricaded life” (Fraiman 4-5). Breakfast on Pluto shares in this re-mapping work by exposing the violence embedded in heteronormative domestic structures, and by charting the radical political potential of trans-domesticity.Unsettling HousesIn the traditional road narrative, “home” tends to be a static, confining structure from which the protagonist escapes, a space that then functions as “a structuring absence” on the road (Robertson 271). Bachelard describes this normative structure as a “dream house” that constitutes “a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability” (17); the house functions, Henri Lefebvre argues, as “the epitome of immobility” (92). Whether the dream is to escape and/or to return, “to write of houses”, as Adam Hanna asserts, “is to raise ideas of shelters that are fixed and secure” (113).Breakfast on Pluto quickly gives lie to those expectations. Kitten is adopted by Ma Braden (Ruth McCabe), a single woman who raises Kitten and her adopted sister in domestic space that is connected to, and part of, a public house. That spatial contiguity undermines any illusion of privacy and security, as is evident in the scene in which a school-aged Kitten, who thought herself safely home alone and thus able to dress in her mother’s and sister’s clothes, is discovered in the act by her mother and sister from the pub’s street entrance. Further, the film lays bare the built-in mechanisms of surveillance and violence that reinforce heteronormative, patriarchal structures. After discovering Kitten in women’s clothes, Ma Braden violently scrubs her clean and whacks her with a brush until Kitten says, “I’m a boy, not a girl”. The public/house space facilitates Ma Braden’s close monitoring of Kitten thereafter.As a young writer in secondary school, Kitten satirises the violence within the hegemonic home by narrating the story of the rape of her biological mother, Eily Bergin (Eva Birthistle), by Kitten’s father, Father Liam (Liam Neeson) in a scene of hyper-domesticity set in the rectory kitchen. As Patrick Mullen notes, “the rendition of the event follows the bubble-gum logic and tone of 1950s Hollywood culture” (130). The relationship between the ideal domesticity thereby invoked and the rape then depicted exposes the sexual violence for what it is: not an external violation of the double sanctity of church and home space, but rather an internal and even intrinsic violence that reinforces and is shielded by the power structures from which normative domesticity is never separate.The only sense of home that seems to bind Kitten to her place of origin is based in her affective bonds to friends Charlie (Ruth Negga) and Lawrence (Seamus Reilly). When Lawrence is killed by a bomb, Kitten is no longer at home, and she leaves town to search for the “phantom” mother she never knew. The impetus for Kitten’s wandering, then, is connection rather than autonomy, and neither the home she leaves, nor the sense of home she seeks, are fixed structures.Mobile Homes and Queering of the Western RoadBreakfast on Pluto tracks how the oppositions that seem to structure traditional road films—such as that between home and mobility, and between domestic and open spaces—continually collapse. The film invokes the “cowboy and Indian” mythology from which the Western road narrative descends (Boyle 19), but to different ends: to capture a desire for non-heteronormative affective bonds rather than “lone ranger” autonomy, and to convey a longing for domesticity on the trail, for a home that is both mobile and open. Across the past century of Irish fiction and film, “cowboy and Indian” mythology has often intersected with queer wandering, from James Joyce’s Dubliners story “An Encounter” (1914) to Lenny Abrahamson’s film Adam & Paul (2004). In this tradition, Breakfast on Pluto queers “cowboy and Indian” iconography to convey an alternative conception of domesticity and home. The prevailing ethos in the film’s queered Western scenes is of trans-domesticity—of inclusion and care during transience and in open spaces. After bar bouncers exclude Kitten and friends because of her transgenderism and Lawrence’s Down syndrome, “The Border Knights” (hippie-bikers-cum-cowboys) ride to their rescue and bring them to their temporary home under the stars. Once settled around the campfire, the first biker shares his philosophy with a cuddled-up Kitten: “When I’m riding my hog, you think I’m riding the road? No way, man. I’m travelling from the past into the future with a druid at my back”. “Druid man or woman?” Kitten asks. “That doesn’t matter”, the biker clarifies, “What matters is the journey”. What matters is not place as fixed destination or gender as static difference, but rather the practice of travelling with open relationships to space, to time, and to others. The bikers welcome all to their fire and include both Kitten and Lawrence in their sharing of jokes and joints. The only exclusion is of reference to political violence, which Charlie’s boyfriend, Irwin (Laurence Kinlan), tries to bring into the conversation.Further, Kitten uses domesticity to try to establish a place for herself while on the road with “Billy Hatchett and The Mohawks”, the touring band that picks her up when she leaves Ma Braden’s. As Mullen notes, “Kitten literally works herself into the band by hand sewing a ‘squaw’ outfit to complement the group’s glam-rock Native American image” (Mullen 141). The duet that Kitten performs with Billy (Gavin Friday), a song about a woman inviting “a wandering man” to share the temporary shelter of her campfire, invokes trans-domesticity. But the film intercuts their performance with scenes of violent border-policing: first, by British soldiers at a checkpoint who threaten the group and boast about the “13 less to deal with” in Derry, and then by members of the Republican Prisoners Welfare Association, who throw cans at the group and yell them off stage. A number of critics have noted the postcolonial implications of Breakfast on Pluto’s use of Native American iconography, which in these intercut scenes clearly raises the national stakes of constructions of domestic belonging (see, for instance, Winston 153-71). In complementary ways, the film queers “cowboy and Indian” mythology to reimagine “mobility” and “home” together.After Kitten is forced out by the rest of the band, Billy sets her up in a caravan, a mobile home left to him by his mother. Though Billy “wouldn’t exactly call it a house”, Kitten sees in it her first chance at a Bachelardian “dream house”: she calls it a “house of dreams and longing” and cries, “Oh, to have a little house, to own the hearth, stool, and all”. Kitten ecstatically begins to tidy the place, performing what Fraiman terms a “hyper-investment in homemaking” that functions “as compensation for domestic deprivation” (20).Aisling Cormack suggests that Kitten’s hyper-investment in homemaking signals the film’s “radical disengagement with politics” to a “femininity that is inherently apolitical” (169-70). But that reading holds only if viewers assume a gendered, spatial divide between public and private, and between the political and the domestic. As Fraiman asserts, “the political meaning of fixating on domestic arrangements is more complex […] For the poor or transgendered person, the placeless immigrant or the woman on her own, aspiring to a safe, affirming home doesn’t reinforce hierarchical social relations but is pitched, precisely, against them” (20).Trans-Domesticity as Political ActEven as Kitten invokes the idea of a Bachelardian dream house, she performs a trans-domesticity that exposes the falseness of the gendered, spatial oppositions assumed to structure the normative home. Her domesticity is not an apolitical retreat; rather, it is pitched, precisely, against the violence that public/private and political/domestic oppositions enable within the house, as well as beyond it. As she cleans, Kitten discovers that violence is literally embedded in her caravan home when she finds a cache of Irish Republican Army (IRA) guns under the floor. After a bomb kills Lawrence, Kitten throws the guns into a reservoir, a defiant act that she describes to the IRA paramilitaries who come looking for the guns as “spring cleaning”. Cormack asserts that Kitten “describing her perilous destruction of the guns in terms of domestic labor” strips it “of all political significance” (179). I argue instead that it demonstrates the radical potential of trans-domesticity, of an ethos of care-taking and shelter-making asserted in public and political spaces. Kitten’s act is not apolitical, though it is decidedly anti-violence.From the beginning of Breakfast on Pluto, Kitten’s trans-domesticity exposes the violence structurally embedded in heteronormative domestic ideology. Additionally, the film’s regular juxtaposition of scenes of Kitten’s homemaking practices with scenes of political violence demonstrates that no form of domesticity functions as a private, apolitical retreat from “the minefields of this world” (McCabe x). This latter counterpoint throws into relief the political significance of Kitten’s trans-domesticity. Her domestic practices are her means of resisting and transforming the structural violence that poses an existential threat to marginalised and dispossessed people.After Kitten is accused of being responsible for an IRA bombing in London, the ruthless, violent interrogation of Kitten by British police officers begins to break down her sense of self. Throughout this brutal scene, Kitten compulsively straightens the chairs and tidies the room, and she responds to her interrogators with kindness and even affection. Fraiman’s theorisation of “extreme domesticity” helps to articulate how Kitten’s homemaking in carceral space—she calls it “My Sweet Little Cell”—is an “urgent” act that, “in the wake of dislocation”, can mean “safety, sanity, and self-expression; survival in the most basic sense” (25). Cormack reads Kitten’s reactions in this scene as “masochistic” and the male police officers’ nurturing response as of a piece with the film’s “more-feminine-than-feminine disengagement from political realities” (185-89). However, I disagree: Kitten’s trans-domesticity is a political act that both sustains her within structures that would erase her and converts officers of the state to an ethos of care and shelter. Inspector Routledge, for example, gently carries Kitten back to her cell, and after her release, PC Wallis ensures that she is safely (if not privately) housed with a cooperatively-run peep show, the address at which an atoning Father Liam locates her in London.After Kitten and a pregnant Charlie are burned out of the refuge that they temporarily find with Father Liam, Kitten and Charlie return to London, where Charlie’s baby is born soon after into the trans-domesticity that opens the film. Rejoining the story’s frame, Breakfast on Pluto ends close to where it begins: Kitten and the baby meet Charlie outside a London hospital, where Kitten sees Eily Bergin with her new son, Patrick. Instead of meeting where their paths intersect, the two families pass each other and turn in opposite directions. Kitten now knows that hers is both a different road and a different kind of home. “Home”, then, is not a place gained once and for all. Rather, home is a perpetual practice that does not separate one from the world, but can create the shelter of mutual care as one wanders through it.The Radical Potential and Structural Limits of Trans-DomesticityBreakfast on Pluto demonstrates the agency that trans-domesticity can afford in the lives of marginalised and dispossessed individuals, as well as the power of the structures that militate against its broader realisation. The radical political potential of trans-domesticity manifests in the transformation in the two police officers’ relational practices. Kitten’s trans-domesticity also inspires a reformation in Father Liam, the film’s representative of the Catholic Church and a man whose relationship to others transmutes from sexual violence and repressive secrecy to mutual nurturance and inclusive love. Although these individual conversions do not signify changes in structures of power, they do allow viewers to imagine the possibility of a state and a church that cherish, shelter, and care for all people equally. The film’s ending conveys this sense of fairy-tale-like possibility through its Disney-esque chattering birds and the bubble-gum pop song, “Sugar Baby Love”.In the end, the sense of hopefulness that closes Breakfast on Pluto coexists with the reality that dominant power structures will not recognise Kitten’s trans-domestic subjectivity and family, and that those structures will work to contain any perceived threat, just as the Catholic Church banishes the converted Father Liam to Kilburn Parish. That Kitten and Charlie nevertheless realise a clear contentment in themselves and in their made family demonstrates the vital importance of trans-domesticity and other forms of “extreme domesticity” in the lives of those who wander.ReferencesAgnew, John. “Home Ownership and Identity in Capitalist Societies.” Housing and Identity: Cross Cultural Perspectives. Ed. James S. Duncan. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1982. 60–97.Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. 1957. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.Boyle, Kevin Jon, ed. Rear View Mirror: Automobile Images and American Identities. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.Breakfast on Pluto. Dir. Neil Jordan. Pathé Pictures International, 2005.Cormack, Aisling B. “Toward a ‘Post-Troubles’ Cinema? The Troubled Intersection of Political Violence and Gender in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto.” Éire-Ireland 49.1–2 (2014): 164–92.Fortier, Anne-Marie. “Queer Diaspora.” Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. Eds. Diane Richardson and Steven Seidman. London: Sage Publishing, 2002. 183–97.Fraiman, Susan. Extreme Domesticity: A View from the Margins. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.Hanna, Adam. Northern Irish Poetry and Domestic Space. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Jung, Carl. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. 1957. Ed. Aniela Jaffe. Trans. Clara Winston and Richard Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Social Space. Trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991.Madden, Ed. “Queering the Irish Diaspora: David Rees and Padraig Rooney.” Éire-Ireland 47.1–2 (2012): 172–200.McCabe, Patrick. Breakfast on Pluto. London: Picador, 1998.Mullen, Patrick R. The Poor Bugger’s Tool: Irish Modernism, Queer Labor, and Postcolonial History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.Rapport, Nigel, and Andrew Dawson. Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of ‘Home’ in a World of Movement. Oxford: Berg, 1998.Robertson, Pamela. “Home and Away: Friends of Dorothy on the Road in Oz.” The Road Movie Book. Eds. Steven Cohen and Ina Rae Hark. London: Routledge, 1997. 271–306.Steedman, Carolyn. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987.Winston, Greg. “‘Reluctant Indians’: Irish Identity and Racial Masquerade.” Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive. Eds. Maria McGarrity and Claire A. Culleton. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 153–71.

Author's Note: The Theme of the Loop: Image, Exhibition and Networkability In his contribution to the anthology, The Digital Dialectic, George P. Landow inventories a set of characteristics that define digital media. These defining traits result from a hybrid mixture of ideas relating hypertext writing to the visual language of collage. Included in this list is the quality of "networkability".1 It is through reading into this particular element that I will focus on the character of the digital image itself as multi-dimensional and how, by extension, this enmeshes notions of the image within a wider network of relations; of image to the imaginary, of vision to visuality, and of artwork to exhibition. Underpinning this text will be my curatorial "projection"2—using the term as it is articulated by Ron Burnett as an active, interpenetration of the processes of vision, representation, technology and the imagination—of the digital image culminating in the exhibition, The Synthetic Image.3 The exhibition presents the work of thirteen artists working within the vectors that define imaging practices informed by new technologies. Exploring the relationship between the real and the virtual, the selected artists and artworks exemplify the crossover between a variety of digital and interactive media informed by other artistic traditions and individual positions on the role of the image in representing, simulating or creating realities. The perspective of this project views the relationship between digital technologies and the image as a synthetic one. Recognizing the ability to double and fold in the malleability of the material from which the digital image is composed, the dichotomy of inside and outside collapses. Instead of conceiving, visualizing pixels as a solid, impenetrable grid, I've tried, rather, to recognize in this resulting surface the qualities of a fabric, as a mesh of interpenetrating, weaving fibres. Instead of the content of the image being contained in the "solid" pixels, it is implied in the "threads" of the screen holding together the field of relationships, looping like a closed electrical or magnetic circuit. The vectors of relationship bound the "empty" image; fastening, holding together and forming the picture. In many ways my approach to this topic (as artist, curator and, in this immediate guise, as author) finds expression in the term "synthesis" defined as a "rhythmic coexistence of radically heterogenous and temporally dispersed elements".4 The virtuality of this thing called an "exhibition" is approached as a narrative space; a fluid, complex epistemological environment. The curatorial role makes evident the subtext of diverse strands connecting respective works and artists and collects them in the space of the gallery in an attempt to draw them into the "loop." The exhibition/ installation operates by gathering together disparate components into what is as much a "context" as a physical and spatial realization. The choice and arrangement of artworks, displayed as printed images or encountered as fleeting emanations of light, creates channels of communication where meaning is more than implied, and can be likened to the type of referentiality associated with that of the image produced by projection and the apparatus of the projector itself. Considered in this way, even static images, fixed into pigment on paper, operate luminously, acting like beacons which together form a constellation of points creating lines of force, motion, influence and meaning; the exhibition itself is a loop structure which enfolds and encircles its incorporated range of (inter, hyper, meta and para) textual components. The writing also parallels a similarly conceived and structured trajectory towards the metaphor of the loop. At its inception, I developed a graphic visualization of the textual content of this text, meditating upon the interrelationships of the synthetic qualities of the image fused with a mapping of theoretical positionings and the example provided through the exhibition itself. This diagram of sorts resulted in a narrative structure which collects the various themes (mesh, weave, wire frame, map, moire and screen) within the text's centrifugal sweep, overlapping with the artists' works comprising the exhibition, and made possible by the navigation structure realized by Leon Meyer. In exploring the formal possibilities offered by hypertext, multiple vantage points and intersections result from the folding and overlapping of image and text. As with crumpling the written page into a ball,5 synthetic qualities are realized. Enter "The Synthetic Image". To view this hypertextual essay, you will need to download the latest version of Macromedia Shockwave. Notes 1. "Digital words and images take the form of semiotic codes, and this fundamental fact about them leads to the characteristic, defining qualities of digital infotech: 1) virtuality, (2) fluidity, (3) adaptability, (4) openness (or existing without borders), (5) processability, (6) infinite duplicability, (7) capacity for being moved about rapidly, and (8) networkability." George P. Landow, "Hypertext as Collage-writing," The Digital Dialectic, ed. Peter Lunenfeld (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2000) 166. 2. "There may be no better time than now (with virtual technologies inching closer to realization) to rethink what we mean when we talk about pictures and what we are capable of saying with the pictures we create. One of my aims then, is to discuss strategies for renaming and redescribing (thus reinterpreting), not only the pictures themselves, but circular processes of interaction, the relationships between images, thought, language and subjectivity." Ron Burnett, Cultures of Vision, Images, Media, and the Imaginary (Bloomington: U of Indiana P, 1995) 24. 3. The Synthetic Image, 8 July 4 August 2002, The Faculty Gallery, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. The artists represented are Marcus Bunyan, Megan Evans, Marcus Fajl, Phil George, Troy Innocent, Murray McKeich, Gerard Minogue, Matthew Perkins, Patricia Piccinini, Lynne Roberts-Goodwin, Daniel Von Sturmer, Trinh Vu and Vince Dziekan. 4. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception, Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1999) 297. 5. This allusion finds an intertextual reference in Daniel von Sturmer's video piece Material From Another Medium included in the exhibition's inventory. Links http://happyjack.artdes.monash.edu.au/syntheticimage/ Citation reference for this article MLA Style Dziekan, Vince. "The Synthetic Image" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.4 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/synthetic.php>. Chicago Style Dziekan, Vince, "The Synthetic Image" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 4 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/synthetic.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Dziekan, Vince. (2002) The Synthetic Image. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(4). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/mc/0208/synthetic.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction In the film Barbie, Stereotypical Ken “only has a great day if Barbie looks at him”. Ken’s identity is based on Barbie’s approval, that is, until he garners the approval of other Kens by reshaping their collective identities under the patriarchy. The Kens’ patriarchal collective identities are demonstrated in part through their participation in popular-culture fandoms. They mansplain The Godfather and Stephen Malkmus, demand their Barbies be “really invested in the Zack Snyder cut of Justice League”, and sing Matchbox 20’s “Push” at the Barbies “while staring uncomfortably into [their] eyes for four and half minutes”. It would be easy to write these moments off as jabs at stereotypic masculine interests. The film's criticism, however, is not only the merit of these interests, nor a declaration that only men care about them. Rather, the critique of patriarchal collective identity is shown in the way these interests are shared through competitive, affirmational fandom. Affirmational fandoms are fandoms built on knowledge of canon, with fan identity typically expressed through competition around mastery of explicit, official knowledge. Affirmational fandoms have historically been thought to draw more men-dominated fan bases (Correa-Chávez, Kohfeldt, and Nguyen 1), as they lend themselves to the kinds of hierarchies inherent in patriarchy. Transformational (or transformative) fandoms, on the other hand, are thought to be more popular among women and gender-diverse fans and show less interest in pure canon ideation, instead utilising the source material to create something entirely new (Jenkins 47-8). In this way, transformational fandom is similar to how Barbies themselves are intended to be played with. This article will explore how Barbie illustrates the differences between affirmational vs. transformational fandom, textually and metatextually, and how patriarchal and binary approaches to fandom ultimately disempower everyone, including those who identify as men. Affirmational vs. Transformational Fandom The term “affirmational fandom” was first coined by Dreamwidth user obsession_inc in 2009 to distinguish fan culture which seeks to reiterate a creator’s intended meaning of a work. Participation in an affirmational fandom is demonstrated through steadfast devotion to canonical knowledge, and adherence to rules inherent to the creator’s own worldbuilding. In affirmational fandom, knowledge of canon is treated as important capital, often traded between fans as a way to best one another in a competition of who knows the most about niche topics. Specifically, fans participate in what sociologist Bourdieu describes as cultural capital (knowledge) that leads to building social capital (networks). Since this type of fandom positions the creator as the master authority on interpretations of works, fans are able to weaponise their own mastery of the text and alignment with the creator's intentions in order to create a social structure within the fandom that is intentionally exclusionary and hierarchical. Moreover, since many popular works have male creators, largely due to systemic inequities in the film, television, and written fiction industries (“2021 Statistics”), this hierarchy also mirrors patriarchy in its unchallenged centring of men’s perspectives and thus its overall appeal to men as fans (Busse). Suzanne Scott further criticised this centring of creators as ultimate authorities through her deconstruction of the "fanboy auteur" (44). The fanboy auteur is someone who functions as both content creator and fan, thus manufacturing an even greater divisiveness between production and the everyday consumer by stratifying the fanboy auteur into a separate category of fan that most other fans cannot achieve. Scott (47) draws upon the Foucauldian notion of textual discourses and the role of the author, or “author function” (Foucault 75), to describe how a fanboy auteur reinforces the status quo by maintaining an exclusionary fan identity, as opposed to allowing the author to fully step back from the work so that it might be interpreted and reinterpreted, vastly, through a diversity of lenses. Foucault argued that the authorial role is, as are most things, socially constructed through public discourse, as is the definition of authorial power (76). In other words, by defining something in media, one has power over it, and that power can be used to discipline who gets to use, understand, and engage with said media as an artifact. As is often seen in patriarchal social structures, the fanboy auteur has overwhelmingly benefited not just men, but white men specifically (Salter and Stanfill). Affirmational fandoms stand in stark contrast to transformational fandoms, a concept popularised by Henry Jenkins in his book Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Jenkins described a transformative process that fans guide texts through, which prioritises meaning-making and imagination over canon, or creator, in fan spaces. This is often done through the production of transformative works such as fan fiction and fan art that are largely unconcerned with fidelity to a work’s creator, sometimes treating them as entirely separate from the production of fan works. While transformational fandoms still exchange cultural capital to build social capital and maintain a sense of hierarchy at times, they do so with a much lower bar for entry that is more accessible to otherwise marginalised fans. In addition to accessibility, transformational fandom has been thought of as a more feminist fandom due to the disproportionate presence of women in transformational fan spaces and their disproportionate engagement in fan labour through the creation of content such as zines and archival fan fiction (Correa-Chávez, Kohfeldt, and Nguyen). Importantly, there are ways in which this labour is exploited by male-dominated industries as a means to signal diverse representation, as opposed to actually including diverse representation in media texts (Lowe). Examples in Barbie Transformative fandom is what Barbie dolls, and by proxy the Barbie movie, were made for. The film’s opening is itself a transformative work, a reimagining of 2001: A Space Odyssey, with young girls rejecting the socially rigid construct of the baby doll for the sleek new toy that defies categorisation. Like transformative works, Barbies can be anything, implying that women and girls can also be anything. As a result, we see Barbies at the start of the film engaging in a broad array of careers and interests, appearing to have a level of autonomy that isn’t quite so easily obtained by women in the real world. Because the Barbie movie also features diverse Barbies including Barbies who are transgender, size-inclusive, of various races and ethnicities, and Barbies who use devices such as wheelchairs, the film also transforms the image of women in popular media by depicting them more realistically than is typical in major motion pictures. The shift that Barbie Land takes in the second act, when Stereotypical Ken introduces the concept of patriarchy, more closely mirrors affirmational fandoms, both textually and metatextually. Textually, the Kens are seen mansplaining various topics. Mansplaining has been defined by researchers “not only as simply patronizing and condescending, but as designed to assert the speaker’s superior knowledge, on the basis of their gender” (Joyce et al. 521). As within affirmational fandoms, through mansplaining, knowledge is used as a form of power. Simply mansplaining, however, is not in and of itself demonstrative of affirmational fandom. For fandom to be affirmational, it must also use said knowledge as cultural capital, elevating the Kens to a place of superiority over the Barbies, as well as over one another, based on their level of higher expertise and deference to a creator. This is where Barbie goes the extra mile as social commentary – the Ken’s are not just talking about the what of these various topics, but, in the case of fandom specifically, the why of it, central to an idealised creator. One of the clearest examples of this is actor Kingsley Ben-Adir’s Ken name-dropping The Godfather’s creators, noting “Coppola’s aesthetic genius” as well as referring to the film as a “triumph to Robert Evans and the architecture of the 1970s studio system”. This Ken is both sharing deep lore about the film’s production, as well as asserting dominance through this knowledge, sharing it only after he has belittled President Barbie for having not watched the film in the first place. Ncuti Gatwa’s Ken likewise discusses how “Stephen Malkmus really harnessed the acerbic talk-singing of Lou Reed with post-punk influences such as ‘The Wire’ and ‘The Fall’”. Neither of these are shallow, hot takes, but instead are the kinds of niche affirmational knowledge that fan studies authors describe as excess made into expertise (Zygutis; Scott). We see this again in Writer Barbie’s discussion of having gotten “really invested in the Zack Synder cut of Justice League” while under the indoctrination of the Kens. In the real world, fans developed a cult-like devotion to the Snyder cut of Justice League after the studio released a shorter, heavily edited version of the film. The organised collective action fans engaged in to pressure the studio to release the Snyder cut (or director’s cut) represents the intersection of affirmational fandom and civically engaged fandom (Cook and Joseph 73). Instead of working toward broader socio-cultural change, however, releasing the Snyder cut allowed fans to focus on levelling up their cultural capital within fandom to pull rank, so to speak, over fans who had not seen this version. This aligns with the idea of the creator’s vision as the ultimate authority over a story – one that not only should be released, but defended as canon. Even the repetition of Matchbox 20’s “Push”, in Barbie, is somewhat affirmational in that it is pure reproduction, right down to the 1990’s grunge singing style of yarling (“Yarling”), which we do not see repeated elsewhere in the diegetic portions of the soundtrack sung by Ryan Gosling or the other actors portraying Kens. Metatextually, we as the audience are meant to be in on the joke, meant to laugh at the Kens for posturing in this way, meant to see it as inherently patriarchal, and thus flawed when viewed through the feminist lens of the film. It is, after all, the very undoing of the Kens, as the Barbies plot to distract them by first aiming to make the Kens think they have power over the Barbies, and then, as Sasha remarks, “make them question whether they have enough power over each other”. This is accomplished by the Barbies through manipulating the Kens’ fannish appreciation for “Push”, done so by feigning interest in their Ken’s replication of the song, only to then wound their Ken’s pride by redirecting that attention to another, rival Ken. This act creates affirmational competition within the fannish display. Stereotypical Barbie even goes so far as to question the authorial voice of the song, which actor Sam Liu’s Ken misattributes to himself, instead of the actual and idealised creator. This interplay between competition and misattribution seeds disruption to the Kens’ collective power by calling into question fannish identity and fidelity to the creator such that in-fighting occurs. It is not the final domino in the chain of unseating the Kens’ power, but it is an important one that can only be accomplished by turning the competition inherent in affirmational fandom into something that can be used against fans, in this case the Kens. How Binary Approaches to Fandom (and Gender) Do Harm An important question the film asks is whether power should be lauded or shared, particularly as it relates to gender politics. Certainly, in the real world, we can see the harms of uneven power dynamics as highlighted by the affirmational nature of knowledge. Mansplaining, for example, has been shown to be prevalent in the modern workplace as a form of typically, but not always, gendered mistreatment, with impacts on job performance, retention, and psychological distress (Smith et al.). It has also been described as a tactic used by some neo-liberal white men as a way to re-centre masculinity and men’s voices as an ultimate source of knowledge, and thus power, in discourse on intersectional feminism, a tactic otherwise described as “covert hegemony” (Burkley 170). Importantly, these kinds of affirmational, hegemonic systems can also be upheld by people other than white men, when said systems prove beneficial to gaining or maintaining power. For example, Rouse, Condis, and Stanfill found examples of hegemony and racism in both anti-liberal and liberal fan spaces online, while Lothian and Stanfill found that even feminist fans spaces perpetuate harm to marginalised groups by the very structures built to protect some while not protecting all marginalised communities. Barbie as a film never quite presents a conclusion to gendered power inequalities. Instead, the film acknowledges multiple flaws in the binary territories of both Barbie Land and the real world but leaves us without an egalitarian solution in either. What Barbie does do is to offer a starting point for further exploration by asking the Kens to see themselves as “Kenough”, affirmed in who they are without the need to vie for power using the affirmational tactics they practiced before. Fandom studies has also only begun to answer questions about gender inequity. Firstly, recent research suggests that a gendered divide between affirmational and transformational fandom may exist, but not quite in the ways previously theorised. Rather than men being more likely to engage in affirmational fandom than women, Correa-Chávez, Kohfeldt, and Nguyen found that women fans were more likely compared to men to engage in all types of fannish activities, both affirmational and transformational, though women did tend to engage in transformational activities the most between the two types of fannish participation (4). Importantly, however, affirmational fandom was narrowly defined through consumption and not proliferation (e.g. reading but not producing plot analyses). Cosplay, or costuming, was also separated out into a third category of mimic fandom, using Matt Hill’s definition of the term from his own paper on the subject. While this third category constitutes an interesting approach to ways in which affirmational and transformational fandom overlap, it also somewhat negates the ways in which cosplay can itself be affirmational (rule-bound) or transformational (changed in ways that fundamentally reimagine a character). Many cosplayers, for example, gender-bend characters, or reinterpret them in ways that are transformative of canon, something that fans of Barbie have been enacting in movie theaters and at pop-culture conventions following the film’s release. These distinctions are important when considering the impact of Barbie on affirmational vs. transformational fan practices in fan spaces, as well as broader spaces. At what point are fans participating in reproduction (affirmational) vs. reimagination (transformational)? The answer depends somewhat on context and the meaning created through the cosplay. For example, cosplay at fan conventions is occurring within a fan space, and thus meaning is made by fan communities. Barbie as a cultural phenomenon has also made its way into non-fannish transformative spaces, however, where meaning is less clear. For example, San Francisco’s 2024 “Hunky Jesus” contest saw “Jesus Ken”, a man dressed as Jesus nailed to a cross inside a Ken-style pink box, take home the win for best costume (Kura). Here, the space between fandom and other communities is blurred, and thus, so is related meaning. Conclusion Barbies are imaginative play, so it is no surprise that Barbie as a film highlights the differences between imaginative, transformational fandom and more rule-bound, affirmational fandom. It is also not a coincidence that those who play with Barbie dolls and those who engage in transformative fan practice are more likely to identify as women, or as having gender- and sexually diverse identities, given ways in which transformational spaces make greater room to create a more equitable world through inherent feminist critique. Imaginative play, in this sense, is a life-long process and continues to be formative for exploring facets of ourselves. Playing with Barbies, including in the Barbie film, enables individuals to understand their place in the world while simultaneously pushing the boundaries of what is possible. Part of the genius of Barbie is that it shows how fan knowledge and practice (cultural capital) can constrain or enable personal and social growth. While the mastery and leveraging of fan knowledge under patriarchy gave the Kens a kind of power, it also isolated and limited them as individuals. Likewise, affirmational fandom can constrain and limit the potential for individuals and communities to change, grow, and explore through engagement with media when used in exclusionary ways. Importantly, affirmational fandom does not have to be exclusionary. Information can just be information. The critique of affirmational fandom is simply that it is often misused when viewed through a feminist lens. Transformational fandom, on the other hand, can challenge dominant cultural tropes, norms, and values. As Barbie demonstrates, transformational fandom has the power to inspire us to imagine better, and that power can never be put back in a box. References 2001: A Space Odyssey. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1968. “2021 Statistics.” Women and Hollywood. 10 Apr. 2024 <https://womenandhollywood.com/resources/statistics/2021-statistics/>. Barbie. Dir. Greta Gerwig. Warner Bros. Pictures, 2023. Bourdieu, Pierre. A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Trans. R. Nice. London: Routledge, 1984. Buerkle, C. Wesley. “Adam Mansplains Everything: White-Hipster Masculinity as Covert Hegemony.” Southern Communication Journal 84.3 (2019): 170–182. DOI: 10.1080/1041794X.2019.1575898. Busse, Kristina. "Geek Hierarchies, Boundary Policing, and the Gendering of the Good Fan." Participations 10.1 (2013): 73-91. ​ Cook, Tanya, and Kaela Joseph. Fandom Acts of Kindness: A Heroic Guide to Activism, Advocacy, and Doing Chaotic Good. Dallas, TX: Smart Pop Books, 2023. Correa-Chávez, Maricela, Danielle Kohfeldt, and John Nguyen. "Women in Fandom: Participation Patterns and Perceived Authenticity." Psychology of Popular Media (2023). DOI: 10.1037/ppm0000470. Foucault, Michel. "What Is an Author?" Reading Architectural History. Routledge, 2003. 71-81. Jenkins, H. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. Updated 20th anniversary ed. New York: Routledge, 2013. Joyce, Jack B., et al. “Speaking Out against Everyday Sexism: Gender and Epistemics in Accusations of ‘Mansplaining.’” Feminism & Psychology 31.4 (2021): 502–529. DOI: 10.1177/095935352097. Justice League (Directors Cut). Dir. Zack Snyder. Warner Bros., 2021. Kukura, Joe. “Photos: ‘Jesus Ken’ Wins Hunky Jesus Contest as Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Celebrate Their 45th Anniversary.” SFList, 1 Apr. 2024. <https://sfist.com/2024/04/01/photos-ken-jesus-wins-hunky-jesus-contest-as-sisters-of-perpetual-indulgence-celebrate-their-45th-anniversary/>. Hills, Matt. “From Dalek Half Balls to Daft Punk Helmets: Mimetic Fandom and the Crafting of Replicas.” Transformative Works and Cultures 16 (2014). DOI: 10.3983/twc.2014.0531. Lothian, Alexis, and Mel Stanfill. "An Archive of Whose Own? White Feminism and Racial Justice in Fan Fiction's Digital Infrastructure." Transformative Works and Cultures 36 (2021). DOI: 10.3983/twc.2021.2119. Lowe, J.S.A. "We’ll Always Have Purgatory: Fan Spaces in Social Media." Journal of Fandom Studies 5.2 (2017): 175-192. DOI: 10.1386/jfs.5.2.175_1. Matchbox 20. “Push.” Yourself or Someone You Like. Atlantic, 1997. obsession_inc. “Affirmational Fandom vs. Transformational Fandom.” Dreamwidth, 1 Jun. 2009. 10 Apr. 2024 <https://obsession-inc.dreamwidth.org/82589.html>. Salter, Anastasia, and Mel Stanfill. A Portrait of the Auteur as Fanboy: The Construction of Authorship in Transmedia Franchises. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2021. Rouse, Lauren, Megan Condis, and Mel Stanfill. "Making Fandom Great Again: Silencing Discussions of Racism in Reactionary and Transformative Fandoms." Popular Communication (2024): 1-13. DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2024.2336254. Scott, Suzanne. "Who’s Steering the Mothership? The Role of the Fanboy Auteur in Transmedia Storytelling" Participatory Cultures Handbook. New York: Routledge, 2013. Smith, Chelsie J., et al. "‘Well, actually’: Investigating Mansplaining in the Modern Workplace." Journal of Management & Organization (2022): 1-19. DOI: 10.1017/jmo.2022.81. The Godfather. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Paramount Pictures, 1972. “Yarling.” TV Tropes, the All Devouring Pop-Culture Wiki, n.d. 10 Apr. 2024 <https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Yarling>. Zygutis, Linda. "Affirmational Canons and Transformative Literature: Notes on Teaching with Fandom." Transformative Works and Cultures 35 (2021). DOI: 10.3983/twc.2021.1917.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and most particularly since 9/11, the government of the United States has used its security services to enforce the order it desires for the world. The US government and its security services appreciate the importance of creating the ideological environment that allows them full-scope in their activities. To these ends they have turned to the movie industry which has not been slow in accommodating the purposes of the state. In establishing the parameters of the War Against Terror after 9/11, one of the Bush Administration’s first stops was Hollywood. White House strategist Karl Rove called what is now described as the Beverley Hills Summit on 19 November 2001 where top movie industry players including chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Jack Valenti met to discuss ways in which the movie industry could assist in the War Against Terror. After a ritual assertion of Hollywood’s independence, the movie industry’s powerbrokers signed up to the White House’s agenda: “that Americans must be called to national service; that Americans should support the troops; that this is a global war that needs a global response; that this is a war against evil” (Cooper 13). Good versus evil is, of course, a staple commodity for the movie industry but storylines never require the good guys to fight fair so with this statement the White House got what it really wanted: Hollywood’s promise to stay on the big picture in black and white while studiously avoiding the troubling detail in the exercise extra-judicial force and state-sanctioned murder. This is not to suggest that the movie industry is a monolithic ideological enterprise. Alternative voices like Mike Moore and Susan Sarandon still find space to speak. But the established economics of the scenario trade are too strong for the movie industry to resist: producers gain access to expensive weaponry to assist production if their story-lines are approved by Pentagon officials (‘Pentagon provides for Hollywood’); the Pentagon finances movie and gaming studios to provide original story formulas to keep their war-gaming relevant to emerging conditions (Lippman); and the Central Intelligence Agency’s “entertainment liaison officer” assists producers in story development and production (Gamson). In this context, the moulding of story-lines to the satisfaction of the Pentagon and CIA is not even an issue, and protestations of Hollywood’s independence is meaningless, as the movie industry pursues patriotic audiences at home and seeks to garner hearts and minds abroad. This is old history made new again. The Cold War in the 1950s saw movies addressing the disruption of world order not so much by Communists as by “others”: sci-fi aliens, schlock horror zombies, vampires and werewolves and mad scientists galore. By the 1960s the James Bond movie franchise, developed by MI5 operative Ian Fleming, saw Western secret agents ‘licensed to kill’ with the justification that such powers were required to deal with threats to world order, albeit by fanciful “others” such as the fanatical scientist Dr. No (1962). The Bond villains provide a catalogue of methods for the disruption of world order: commandeering atomic weapons and space flights, manipulating finance markets, mind control systems and so on. As the Soviet Union disintegrated, Hollywood produced a wealth of material that excused the paranoid nationalism of the security services through the hegemonic masculinity of stars such as Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal and Bruce Willis (Beasley). Willis’s Die Hard franchise (1988/1990/1995) characterised US insouciance in the face of newly created terrorist threats. Willis personified the strategy of the Reagan, first Bush and Clinton administrations: a willingness to up the ante, second guess the terrorists and cower them with the display of firepower advantage. But the 1997 instalment of the James Bond franchise saw an important shift in expectations about the source of threats to world order. Tomorrow Never Dies features a media tycoon bent on world domination, manipulating the satellite feed, orchestrating conflicts and disasters in the name of ratings, market share and control. Having dealt with all kinds of Cold War plots, Bond is now confronted with the power of the media itself. As if to mark this shift, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) made a mockery of the creatively bankrupt conventions of the spy genre. But it was the politically corrupt use to which the security services could be put that was troubling a string of big-budget filmmakers in the late 90s. In Enemy of the State (1998), an innocent lawyer finds himself targeted by the National Security Agency after receiving evidence of a political murder motivated by the push to extend the NSA’s powers. In Mercury Rising (1998), a renegade FBI agent protects an autistic boy who cracks a top-secret government code and becomes the target for assassins from an NSA-like organisation. Arlington Road (1999) features a college professor who learns too much about terrorist organisations and has his paranoia justified when he becomes the target of a complex operation to implicate him as a terrorist. The attacks on September 11 and subsequent Beverley Hills Summit had a major impact on movie product. Many film studios edited films (Spiderman) or postponed their release (Schwarzenegger’s Collateral Damage) where they were seen as too close to actual events but insufficiently patriotic (Townsend). The Bond franchise returned to its staple of fantastical villains. In Die Another Day (2002), the bad guy is a billionaire with a laser cannon. The critical perspective on the security services disappeared overnight. But the most interesting development has been how fantasy has become the key theme in a number of franchises dealing with world order that have had great box-office success since 9/11, particularly Lord of the Rings (2001/2/3) and Harry Potter (2001/2/4). While deeply entrenched in the fantasy genre, each of these franchises also addresses security issues: geo-political control in the Rings franchise; the subterfuges of the Ministry for Muggles in the _Potter _franchise. Looking at world order through the supernatural lens has particular appeal to audiences confronted with everyday threats. These fantasies follow George Bush’s rhetoric of the “axis of evil” in normalising the struggle for world order in term of black and white with the expectation that childish innocence and naïve ingenuity will prevail. Only now with three years hindsight since September 11 can we begin to see certain amount of self-reflection by disenchanted security staff return to the cinema. In Man on Fire (2004) the burned-out ex-CIA assassin has given up on life but regains some hope while guarding a child only to have everything disintegrate when the child is killed and he sets out on remorseless revenge. Spartan (2004) features a special forces officer who fails to find a girl and resorts to remorseless revenge as he becomes lost in a maze of security bureaucracies and chance events. Security service personnel once again have their doubts but only find redemption in violence and revenge without remorse. From consideration of films before and after September 11, it becomes apparent that the movie industry has delivered on their promises to the Bush administration. The first response has been the shift to fantasy that, in historical terms, will be seen as akin to the shift to musicals in the Depression. The flight to fantasy makes the point that complex situations can be reduced to simple moral decisions under the rubric of good versus evil, which is precisely what the US administration requested. The second, more recent response has been to accept disenchantment with the personal costs of the War on Terror but still validate remorseless revenge. Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill franchise (2003/4) seeks to do both. Thus the will to world order being fought out in the streets of Iraq is sublimated into fantasy or excused as a natural response to a world of violence. It is interesting to note that television has provided more opportunities for the productive consideration of world order and the security services than the movies since September 11. While programs that have had input from the CIA’s “entertainment liaison officer” such as teen-oriented, Buffy-inspired Alias and quasi-authentic The Agency provide a no-nonsense justification for the War on Terror (Gamson), others such as 24, West Wing _and _Threat Matrix have confronted the moral problems of torture and murder in the War on Terrorism. 24 uses reality TV conventions of real-time plot, split screen exposition, unexpected interventions and a close focus on personal emotions to explore the interactions between a US President and an officer in the Counter Terrorism Unit. The CTU officer does not hesitate to summarily behead a criminal or kill a colleague for operational purposes and the president takes only a little longer to begin torturing recalcitrant members of his own staff. Similarly, the president in West Wing orders the extra-judicial death of a troublesome player and the team in Threat Matrix are ready to exceeded their powers. But in these programs the characters struggle with the moral consequences of their violent acts, particularly as family members are drawn into the plot. A running theme of Threat Matrix is the debate within the group of their choices between gung-ho militarism and peaceful diplomacy: the consequences of a simplistic, hawkish approach are explored when an Arab-American college professor is wrongfully accused of supporting terrorists and driven towards the terrorists because of his very ordeal of wrongful accusation. The world is not black and white. Almost half the US electorate voted for John Kerry. Television still must cater for liberal, and wealthy, demographics who welcome the extended format of weekly television that allows a continuing engagement with questions of good or evil and whether there is difference between them any more. Against the simple world view of the Bush administration we have the complexities of the real world. References Beasley, Chris. “Reel Politics.” Australian Political Studies Association Conference, University of Adelaide, 2004. Cooper, Marc. “Lights! Cameras! Attack!: Hollywood Enlists.” The Nation 10 December 2001: 13-16. Gamson, J. “Double Agents.” The American Prospect 12.21 (3 December 2001): 38-9. Lippman, John. “Hollywood Casts About for a War Role.” Wall Street Journal 9 November 2001: A1. “Pentagon Provides for Hollywood.” USA Today 29 March 2001. http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/2001-05-17-pentagon-helps-hollywood.htm>. Townsend, Gary. “Hollywood Uses Selective Censorship after 9/11.” e.press 12 December 2002. http://www.scc.losrios.edu/~express/021212hollywood.html>. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stockwell, Stephen. "The Manufacture of World Order: The Security Services and the Movie Industry." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/10-stockwell.php>. APA Style Stockwell, S. (Jan. 2005) "The Manufacture of World Order: The Security Services and the Movie Industry," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/10-stockwell.php>.

Does the arrival of the network society mean we are now a culture of collectors, a society of sharers? We mused about these questions while assembling this M/C Journal issue, which has its genesis in a past event of ‘shared’ confusion. Alex Burns booked into Axel Bruns’s hotel room at the 1998 National Young Writer’s Festival (NYWF) in Newcastle. This ‘identity theft’ soon extended to discussion panels and sessions, where some audience members wondered if the NYWF program had typographical errors. We planned, over café latte at Haddon’s Café, to do a co-session at next year’s festival. By then the ‘identity theft’ had spread to online media. We both shared some common interests: the music of Robert Fripp and King Crimson, underground electronica and experimental turntablism, the Internet sites Slashdot and MediaChannel.org, and the creative possibilities of Open Publishing. “If you’re going to use a pseudonym,” a prominent publisher wrote to Alex Burns in 2001, “you could have created a better one than Axel Bruns.” We haven’t yet done our doppelgänger double-act at NYWF but this online collaboration is a beginning. What became clear during the editorial process was that some people and communities were better at sharing than others. Is sharing the answer or the problem: does it open new possibilities for a better, fairer future, or does it destroy existing structures to leave nothing but an uncontrollable mess? The feature article by Graham Meikle elaborates on several themes explored in his insightful book Future Active: Media Activism and the Internet (New York: Routledge, London: Pluto Press, 2002). Meikle’s study of the influential IndyMedia network dissects three ‘compelling founder’s stories’: the Sydney-based Active software team, the tradition of alternative media, and the frenetic energy of ‘DiY culture’. Meikle remarks that each of these ur-myths “highlights an emphasis on access and participation; each stresses new avenues and methods for new people to create news; each shifts the boundary of who gets to speak.” As the IndyMedia movement goes truly global, its autonomous teams are confronting how to be an international brand for Open Publishing, underpinned by a viable Open Source platform. IndyMedia’s encounter with the Founder’s Trap may have its roots in paradigms of intellectual property. What drives Open Source platforms like IndyMedia and Linux, Tom Graves proposes, are collaborative synergies and ‘win-win’ outcomes on a vast and unpredictable scale. Graves outlines how projects like Lawrence Lessig’s Creative Commons and the Free Software Foundation’s ‘GNU Public License’ challenge the Western paradigm of property rights. He believes that Open Source platforms are “a more equitable and sustainable means to manage the tangible and intangible resources of this world we share.” The ‘clash’ between the Western paradigm of property rights and emerging Open Source platforms became manifest in the 1990s through a series of file-sharing wars. Andy Deck surveys how the ‘browser war’ between Microsoft and Netscape escalated into a long-running Department of Justice anti-trust lawsuit. The Motion Picture Association of America targeted DVD hackers, Napster’s attempt to make the ‘Digital Jukebox in the Sky’ a reality was soon derailed by malicious lawsuits, and Time-Warner CEO Gerald Levin depicted pre-merger broadband as ‘the final battleground’ for global media. Whilst Linux and Mozilla hold out promise for a more altruistic future, Deck contemplates, with a reference to George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938), that Internet producers “must conform to the distribution technologies and content formats favoured by the entertainment and marketing sectors, or else resign themselves to occupying the margins of media activity.” File-sharing, as an innovative way of sharing access to new media, has had social repercussions. Marjorie Kibby reports that “global music sales fell from $41.5 billion in 1995 to $38.5 billion in 1999.” Peer-to-Peer networks like KaZaA, Grokster and Morpheus have surged in consumer popularity while commercial music file subscription services have largely fallen by the wayside. File-sharing has forever changed the norms of music consumption, Kibby argues: it offers consumers “cheap or free, flexibility of formats, immediacy, breadth of choice, connections with artists and other fans, and access to related commodities.” The fragmentation of Australian families into new diversities has co-evolved with the proliferation of digital media. Donell Holloway suggests that the arrival of pay television in Australia has resurrected the ‘house and hearth’ tradition of 1940s radio broadcasts. Internet-based media and games shifted the access of media to individual bedrooms, and changed their spatial and temporal natures. However pay television’s artificial limit of one television set per household reinstated the living room as a family space. It remains to be seen whether or not this ‘bounded’ control will revive family battles, dominance hierarchies and power games. This issue closes with a series of reflections on how the September 11 terrorist attacks transfixed our collective gaze: the ‘sharing’ of media connects to shared responses to media coverage. For Tara Brabazon the intrusive media coverage of September 11 had its precursor in how Great Britain’s media documented the Welsh mining disaster at Aberfan on 20 October 1966. “In the stark grey iconography of September 11,” Brabazon writes, “there was an odd photocopy of Aberfan, but in the negative.” By capturing the death and grief at Aberfan, Brabazon observes, the cameras mounted a scathing critique of industrialisation and the searing legacy of preventable accidents. This verité coverage forces the audience to actively engage with the trauma unfolding on the television screen, and to connect with their own emotions. Or at least that was the promise never explored, because the “Welsh working class community seemed out of time and space in 1960s Britain,” and because political pundits quickly harnessed the disaster for their own electioneering purposes. In the early 1990s a series of ‘humanitarian’ interventions and televised conflicts popularized the ‘CNN Effect’ in media studies circles as a model of how captivated audiences and global media vectors could influence government policies. However the U.S. Government, echoing the coverage of Aberfan, used the ‘CNN Effect’ for counterintelligence and consensus-making purposes. Alex Burns reviews three books on how media coverage of the September 11 carnage re-mapped our ‘virtual geographies’ with disturbing consequences, and how editors and news values were instrumental in this process. U.S. President George W. Bush’s post-September 11 speeches used ‘shared’ meanings and symbols, news values morphed into the language of strategic geography, and risk reportage obliterated the ideal of journalistic objectivity. The deployment of ‘embedded’ journalists during the Second Gulf War (March-April 2003) is the latest development of this unfolding trend. September 11 imagery also revitalized the Holocaust aesthetic and portrayal of J.G. Ballard-style ‘institutionalised disaster areas’. Royce Smith examines why, in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks, macabre photo-manipulations of the last moments became the latest Internet urban legend. Drawing upon the theoretical contributions of Jean Baudrillard, Roland Barthes and others, Smith suggests that these photo-manipulations were a kitsch form of post-traumatic visualisation for some viewers. Others seized on Associated Press wire photos, whose visuals suggested the ‘face of Satan’ in the smoke of the World Trade Center (WTC) ruins, as moral explanations of disruptive events. Imagery of people jumping from the WTC’s North Tower, mostly censored in North America’s press, restored the humanness of the catastrophe and the reality of the viewer’s own mortality. The discovery of surviving artwork in the WTC ruins, notably Rodin’s The Thinker and Fritz Koenig’s The Sphere, have prompted art scholars to resurrect this ‘dead art’ as a memorial to September 11’s victims. Perhaps art has always best outlined the contradictions that are inherent in the sharing of cultural artefacts. Art is part of our, of humanity’s, shared cultural heritage, and is celebrated as speaking to the most fundamental of human qualities, connecting us regardless of the markers of individual identity that may divide us – yet art is also itself dividing us along lines of skill and talent, on the side of art production, and of tastes and interests, on the side of art consumption. Though perhaps intending to share the artist’s vision, some art also commands exorbitant sums of money which buy the privilege of not having to share that vision with others, or (in the case of museums and galleries) to set the parameters – and entry fees – for that sharing. Digital networks have long been promoted as providing the environment for unlimited sharing of art and other content, and for shared, collaborative approaches to the production of that content. It is no surprise that the Internet features prominently in almost all of the articles in this ‘share’ issue of M/C Journal. It has disrupted the existing systems of exchange, but how the pieces will fall remains to be seen. For now, we share with you these reports from the many nodes of the network society – no doubt, more connections will continue to emerge. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Burns, Alex and Bruns, Axel. ""Share" Editorial" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>. APA Style Burns, A. & Bruns, A. (2003, Apr 23). "Share" Editorial. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,< http://www.media-culture.org.au/0304/01-editorial.php>

IntroductionThe perception of the archive as the warehouse of tradition is inflected with the notion that what it stores is also removed from the everyday, at once ancient but also irrelevant, standing still outside time. Yet, if the past is of any relevance, the archive cannot maintain a rigid fixity that does not intersect with the present. In the work of the Atlas Group, the fabrication of “archival material” reflects what Hal Foster has termed an “archival impulse” that is constructed of multiple temporalities. The Atlas Group archive interrogates forms that are at once still, excavated from life, while still being in the present. In the process, the reductive singularity of the archive as an immobile monument is opened up to the complexity of a radical stillness through which the past enters the present in a moment of recognition. What is still, and what is still there, intersect in the productivity of a stillness that cuts through an undifferentiated continuity. This juncture echoes the Benjaminian flash which heralds the arrival of past in the presentTo articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. (Benjamin, Theses)Klee’s Angelus Novus stands still between past and future as a momentary suspension of motion brings history and prophecy into the present. For “the historian of the dialectic at a standstill”, Walter Benjamin, historical materialism was not simply a means of accessing the past in the present, but of awakening the potential of the future (Tiedemann 944-945). This, Rolf Tiedemann suggests, was the revolution of historical perception that Benjamin wanted to bring about in his unfinished Arcades Project (941). By carrying the principle of montage into history, Benjamin indicates an intention “to discover in the analysis of the small individual moment the crystal of the total event” (Benjamin Arcades 461). This principle had already been alluded to in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” where he had written that a historical materialist cannot do without a present in which time stands still, and later, that it is in the arrest of thought that what has been and what will be “crystallizes into a monad” (Benjamin “Theses” 262-263).Everywhere in Benjamin’s writings on history, there is something of the irreducibility of the phrase “standing still”. Standing still: still as an active, ongoing form of survival and endurance, still as an absence of movement. The duality of stillness is amplified as semantic clarity vacillates between one possibility and another: to endure and to be motionless. Is it possible to reduce “standing still” to a singularity? Benjamin’s counsel to take hold of memory at the “moment of danger” might be an indication of this complexity. The “moment of danger” emerges as the flash of the past in the present, but also the instant at which the past could recede into the inertia of eternity, at once a plea against the reduction of the moment into a “dead time” and recognition of the productivity of stillness.Something of that “flash” surfaces in Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Michel Foucault: “a first light opens up things and brings forth visibilities as flashes and shimmerings, which are the ‘second light’” (Deleuze 50). The first flash makes “visibilities visible” and determines what can be seen in a given historical period, while the second makes “statements articulable” and defines what can be said (Deleuze 50). These visibilities and statements, however, are distributed into the stratum and constitute knowledge as “stratified, archivized, and endowed with a relatively rigid segmentarity” (Deleuze 61). Strata are historically determined, what they constitute of perceptions and discursive formations varies across time and results in the presence of thresholds between the stratum that come to behave as distinct layers subject to splits and changes in direction (Deleuze 44). Despite these temporal variations that account for differences across thresholds, the strata appear as fixed entities, they mimic rock formations shaped over thousands of years of sedimentation (Deleuze and Guattari 45). Reading Deleuze on Foucault in conjunction with his earlier collaborative work with Felix Guattari brings forth distant shadows of another “stratification”. A Thousand Plateaus is notably less interested in discursive formations and more concerned with “striation”, the organisation and arrangement of space by the diagrams of power. Striated space is state space. It is offset by moving in the opposite direction, effectively turning striated space into smooth space (Deleuze and Guattari 524).Whether on striation or stratification, Deleuze’s work exhibits more than a cautionary distrust of processes of classification, regulation, and organization. Despite the flash that brings visibilities and statements into being, stratification, as much as striation, remains a technique of knowledge shaped by the strategies of power. It is interesting however, that Deleuze sees something as indeterminate as a flash, creating structures that are as determined as stratum. Yet perhaps this is a deceptive conjecture since while the strata appear relatively rigid they are also “extremely mobile” (Deleuze and Guattari 553). Foucault had already given an indication that what the archaeological method uncovers is not necessarily suspended, but rather that it suspends the notion of an absolute continuity (Archaeology 169). He suggests that “history is that which transforms documents into monuments” (7). The task of archaeology, it would seem, is to recover documents from monuments by demonstrating rather than reversing the process of sedimentation and without necessarily relying on a motionless past. While there is a relative, albeit interstratically tentative, stillness in the strata, absolute destratification proceeds towards deterritorialisation through incessant movement (Deleuze and Guattari 62-63).If A Thousand Plateaus is any indication, the imperative for the creative thinker today seems to be stirring in this direction: movement, motion, animation. Whatever forms of resistance are to be envisioned, it is motion, rather than stillness, that emerges as a radical form of action (Deleuze and Guattari 561). The question raised by these theoretical interventions is not so much whether such processes are indeed valuable forms of opposition, but rather, whether movement is always the only means, or the most effective means, of resistance? To imagine resistance as “staying in place” seems antithetical to nomadic thinking but is it not possible to imagine moments when the nomad resists not by travelling, but by dwelling? What of all those living a life of forced nomadism, or dying nomadic deaths, those for whom movement is merely displacement and loss? In Metamorphoses Rosi Braidotti reflects upon forced displacement and loss, yet her emphasis nonetheless remains on “figurations”, mappings of identity through time and space, mappings of movement (2-3). Braidotti certainly does not neglect the victims of motion, those who are forced to move, yet she remains committed to nomadism as a form of becoming. Braidotti’s notion of “figurations” finds a deeply poignant expression in Joseph Pugliese’s textual maps of some of these technically “nomadic” bodies and their movement from the North African littoral into the waters of the Mediterranean where they eventually surface on southern European shores as corpses (Pugliese 15). While Braidotti recognizes the tragedy of these involuntary nomads, it is in Pugliese’s work that this tragedy is starkly exposed and given concrete form in the figures of Europe’s refugees. This is movement as death, something akin to what Paul Virilio calls inertia, the product of excessive speed, the uncanny notion of running to stand still (Virilio 16).This tension between motion and stillness surfaces again in Laura Marks’ essay “Asphalt Nomadism.” Despite wanting to embrace the desert as a smooth space Marks retorts that “smooth space seems always to be elsewhere” (Marks 126). She notes the stability of the acacia trees and thorny shrubs in the desert and the way that nomadic people are constantly beset with invitations from the “civilising forces of religion and the soporific of a daily wage” (Marks 126). Emphatically she concludes that “the desert is never really ‘smooth’, for that is death” (Marks 126). On this deviation from Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the desert as smooth space she concludes: “we who inherit their thinking need to stay on the ground: both in thought, moving close to the surface of concepts, and literally, remaining alert to signs of life in the sand and the scrub of the desert” (Marks 126). In Marks’ appeal for groundedness the tension between motion and stillness is maintained rather than being resolved through recourse to smoothness or in favour of perpetual movement. The sedentary and still structures that pervade the desert remain: the desert could not exist without them. In turn we might ask whether even the most rigorous abstraction can convince us that the ground between radical nomadism and perpetual displacement does not also need to be rethought. Perhaps this complexity is starkest when we begin to think about war, not only the potentiality of the war-machine to destabilize the state (Deleuze and Guattari 391), but war as the deterritorialisation of bodies, lives and livelihoods. Is the war of nomadism against the state not somehow akin to war as the violence that produces nomadic bodies through forced displacement? One of the questions that strikes me about the work of the Atlas Group, “an imaginary non-profit research foundation established in Beirut to research and document the contemporary history of Lebanon” (Raad 68) through the production and exhibition of “archival” material, is whether their propensity towards still forms in the creation of documentary evidence cannot be directly attributed to war as perpetual movement and territorial flexibility, as the flattening of structure and the creation of “smooth space” (Deleuze and Guattari 389). One need only think of the reigns of terror that begin with destratification – abolishing libraries, destroying documents, burning books. On the work of the Atlas Group, Andre Lepecki offers a very thorough introduction:The Atlas Group is an ongoing visual and performative archival project initiated by Walid Raad …whose main topic and driving force are the multiple and disparate events that history and habit have clustered into one singularity named “The Lebanese Civil Wars of 1975-1991”. (Lepecki 61).While the “inventedness” of the Atlas Group’s archive, its “post-event” status as manufactured evidence, raises a myriad of questions about how to document the trauma of war, its insistence on an “archival” existence, rather than say a purely artistic one, also challenges the presumption that the process of becoming, indeed of producing or even creating, is necessarily akin to movement or animation by insisting on the materiality of producing “documents” as opposed to the abstraction of producing “art”. The Atlas Group archive does not contribute directly to the transformation of visibilities into statements so much as statements into visibilities. Indeed, the “archival impulse” that seems to be present here works against the constitution of discursive formations precisely by making visible those aspects of culture which continue to circulate discursively while not necessarily existing. In other words, if one reads the sedimentary process of stratification as forming knowledge by allowing the relationships between “words” and “things” to settle or to solidify into historical strata, then the Atlas Group project seems to tap into the stillness of these stratified forms in order to reverse the signification of “things” and “words”. Hal Foster’s diagnosis of an “archival impulse” is located in a moment where, as he says, “almost anything goes and almost nothing sticks” in reference to the current obliviousness of contemporary artistic practices to political culture (Foster 2-3). Foster’s observation endows this paper with more than just an appropriate title since what Foster seems to identify are the limitations of the current obsession with speed. What one senses in the Atlas Group’s “archival impulse” and Foster’s detection of an “archival impulse” at play in contemporary cultural practices is a war against the war on form, a war against erasure through speed, and an inclination to dwell once more in the dusty matter of the past, rather than to pass through it. Yet the archive, in the view of nomadology, might simply be what Benjamin Hutchens terms “the dead-letter office of lived memory” (38). Indeed Hutchens’s critical review of the archive is both timely and relevant pointing out that “the preservation of cultural memories eradicated from culture itself” simply establishes the authority of the archive by erasing “the incessant historical violence” through which the archive establishes itself (Hutchens 38). In working his critique through Derrida’s Archive Fever, Hutchens revisits the concealed etymology of the word “archive” which “names at once the commencement and the commandment” (Derrida 1). Derrida’s suggestion that the concept of the archive shelters both the memory of this dual meaning while also sheltering itself from remembering that it shelters such a memory (Derrida 2) leads Hutchens to assert that “the archival ‘act’ opens history to the archive, but it closes politics to its own archivization” (Hutchens 44). The danger that “memory cultures”, archives among them, pose to memory itself has also been explored elsewhere by Andreas Huyssen. Although Huyssen does not necessary hold memory up as something to be protected from memory cultures, he is critical of the excessive saturation of contemporary societies with both (Huyssen 3). Huyssen refers to this as the “hypertrophy of memory” following Nietzsche’s “hypertrophy of history” (Huyssen 2-3). Although Hutchens and Huyssen differ radically in direction, they seem to concur nonetheless that what could be diagnosed as an “archival impulse” in contemporary societies might describe only the stagnation and stiltedness of the remainders of lived experience.To return once more to Foster’s notion of an “archival impulse” in contemporary art practices, rather than the reinstitution of the archive as the warehouse of tradition, what seems to be at stake is not necessarily the agglutination of forms, but the interrogation of formations (Foster 3). One could say that this is the archive interrogated through the eyes of art, art interrogated through the eyes of the archive. Perhaps this is precisely what the Atlas Group does by insisting on manufacturing documents in the form of documentary evidence. “Missing Lebanese Wars”, an Atlas Group project produced in 1998, takes as its point of departure the hypothesisthat the Lebanese civil war is not a self-evident episode, an inert fact of nature. The war is not constituted by unified and coherent objects situated in the world; on the contrary, the Lebanese civil war is constituted by and through various actions, situations, people, and accounts. (Raad 17-18)The project consists of a series of plates made up of pages taken from the notebook of a certain Dr Fadl Fakhouri, “the foremost historian of the civil war in Lebanon” until his death in 1993 (Raad 17). The story goes that Dr Fakhouri belonged to a gathering of “major historians” who were also “avid gamblers” that met at the race track every Sunday – the Marxists and the Islamists bet on the first seven races, while the Maronite nationalists and the socialists bet on the last eight (Raad 17). It was alleged that the historians would bribe the race photographer to take only one shot as the winning horse reached the post. Each historian would bet on exactly “how many fractions of a second before or after the horse crossed the line – the photographer would expose his frame” (Raad 17). The pages from Dr Fakhouri’s notebook are comprised of these precise exposures of film as the winning horse crossed the line – stills, as well as measurements of the distance between the horse and the finish line amid various other calculations, the bets that the historians wagered, and short descriptions of the winning historians given by Dr Fakhouri. The notebook pages, with photographs in the form of newspaper clippings, calculations and descriptions of the winning historians in English, are reproduced one per plate. In producing these documents as archival evidence, the Atlas Group is able to manufacture the “unified and coherent objects” that do not constitute the war as things that are at once irrelevant, incongruous and non-sensical. In other words, presenting material that is, while clearly fictitious, reflective of individual “actions, situations, people, and accounts” as archival material, the Atlas Group opens up discourses about the sanctity of historical evidence to interrogation by producing documentary evidence for circulating cultural discourses.While giving an ironic shape to this singular and complete picture of the war that continues to pervade popular cultural discourses in Lebanon through the media with politicians still calling for a “unified history”, the Atlas Group simultaneously constitute these historical materials as the work of a single person, Dr Fakhouri. Yet it seems that our trustworthy archivist also chooses not to write about the race, but about the winning historian – echoing the refusal to conceive of the war as a self-evident fact (to talk about the race as a race) and to see it rather as an interplay of individuals, actions and narratives (to view the race through the description of the winning historian). Indeed Dr Fakhouri’s descriptions of the winning historians are almost comical for their affinity with descriptions of Lebanon’s various past and present political leaders. A potent shadow, and a legend that has grown into an officially sanctioned cult (Plate 1).Avuncular rather than domineering, he was adept at the well-timed humorous aside to cut tension. (Plate 3).He is 71. But for 6 years he was in prison and for 10 years he was under house arrest and in exile, so those 16 years should be deducted – then he’s 55 (Plate 5). (Raad 20-29)Through these descriptions of the historians, Lebanon’s “missing” wars begin to play themselves out between one race and the next. While all we have are supposed “facts” with neither narrative, movement, nor anything else that could connect one fact to another that is not arbitrary, we are also in the midst of an archive that is as random as these “facts.” This is the archive of the “missing” wars, wars that are not documented and victims that are not known, wars that are “missing” for no good reason.What is different about this archive may not be the way in which order is manufactured and produced, but rather the background against which it is set. In his introduction to The Order of Things Michel Foucault makes reference to “a certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in a passage by Borges whereanimals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable… (xvi)“The uneasiness that makes us laugh when we read Borges”, writes Foucault, is the sense of loss of a “common” name and place (Order, xx). Whereas in Eusethenes, (“I am no longer hungry. Until the morrow, safe from my saliva all the following shall be: Aspics, Acalephs, Acanathocephalates […]”) the randomness of the enumerated species is ordered by their non-location in Eusthenes’ mouth (Foucault, Order xvii), in Borges there is no means through which the enumerated species can belong in a common place except in language (Foucault, Order, xviii). In the same way, the work of the Atlas Group is filtered through the processes of archival classification without belonging to the archives of any real war. There is no common ground against which they can be read except the purported stillness of the archive itself, its ability to put things in place and to keep them there.If the Atlas Group’s archives of Lebanon’s wars are indeed to work against the fluidity of war and its ability to enter and reshape all spaces, then the archival impulse they evoke must be one in which the processes of sedimentation that create archival documents are worked through a radical stillness, tapping into the suspended motion of the singular moment – its stillness, in order to uncover stillness as presence, survival, endurance, to be there still. Indeed, if archives turn “documents into monuments” (Enwezor 23), then the “theatre of statements” that Foucault unearths (Deleuze 47) are not those recovered in the work of the Atlas Group since is not monuments, but documents, that the Atlas Group archive uncovers.It is true that Benjamin urges us to seize hold of memory at the moment of danger, but he does not instruct us as to what to do with it once we have it, yet, what if we were to read this statement in conjunction with another, “for every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably” (Benjamin, “Theses” 255). By turning monuments into documents it is possible that the Atlas Group reconfigure the formations that make up the archive, indeed any archive, by recognizing images of the past as being still in the present. Not still as a past tense, motionless, but still as enduring, remaining. In the work of the Atlas Group the archival impulse is closely aligned to a radical stillness, letting the dust of things settle after its incitation by the madness of war, putting things in place that insist on having a place in language. Against such a background Benjamin’s “moment of danger” is more than the instant of sedimentation, it is the productivity of a radical stillness in which the past opens onto the present, it is this moment that makes possible a radical reconfiguration of the archival impulse.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard U Press, 2002.———. “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books, 2007.Braidotti, Rosi. Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. Trans. Seán Hand. New York: Continuum, 1999.Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. New York: Continuum, 2004.Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Trans. Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996.Enwezor, Okwui. Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. Göttingen: Steidl Publishers, 2008.Foster, Hal. “An Archival Impulse.” October 110 (Fall 2004): 3-22.Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Routledge, 1992.———. The Order of Things. London: Routledge, 2002.Hutchens, Benjamin. “Techniques of Forgetting? Hypo-Amnesic History and the An-Archive.” SubStance 36.3 (2007): 37-55.Huyssen, Andreas. Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2003.Lepecki, Andre. “In the Mist of the Event: Performance and the Activation of Memory in the Atlas Group Archive.” Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow. Ed.Walid Raad. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007.Marks, Laura. “Asphalt Nomadism: The New Desert in Arab Independent Cinema.” Landscape and Film. Ed. Martin Lefebvre. New York: Routledge, 2006.Pugliese, Joseph. “Bodies of Water.” Heat 12 (2006): 12-20. Raad, Walid. Scratching on the Things I Could Disavow. Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2007.Schmitz, Britta, and Kassandra Nakas. The Atlas Group (1989-2004). Köln: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2006.Tiedemann, Rolf. “Dialectics at a Standstill.” The Arcades Project. Walter Benjamin. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard U P, 2002.Virilio, Paul. Open Sky. Trans. Julie Rose. London: Verso, 1997.

Newspapers and the 7:15 Showing Cinemagoing involves planning. Even in the most impromptu instances, one has to consider meeting places, line-ups and competing responsibilities. One arranges child care, postpones household chores, or rushes to finish meals. One must organise transportation and think about routes, traffic, parking or public transit. And during the course of making plans for a trip to the cinema, whether alone or in the company of others, typically one turns to locate a recent newspaper. Consulting its printed page lets us ascertain locations, a selection of film titles and their corresponding show times. In preparing to feed a cinema craving, we burrow through a newspaper to an entertainment section, finding a tableau of information and promotional appeals. Such sections compile the mini-posters of movie advertisements, with their truncated credits, as well as various reviews and entertainment news. We see names of shopping malls doubling as names of theatres. We read celebrity gossip that may or may not pertain to the film selected for that occasion. We informally rank viewing priorities ranging from essential theatrical experiences to those that can wait for the videotape release. We attempt to assess our own mood and the taste of our filmgoing companions, matching up what we suppose are appropriate selections. Certainly, other media vie to supplant the newspaper's role in cinemagoing; many now access on-line sources and telephone services that offer the crucial details about start times. Nonetheless, as a campaign by the Newspaper Association of America in Variety aimed to remind film marketers, 80% of cinemagoers refer to newspaper listings for times and locations before heading out. The accuracy of that association's statistics notwithstanding, for the moment, the local daily or weekly newspaper has a secure place in the routines of cinematic life. A basic impetus for the newspaper's role is its presentation of a schedule of show times. Whatever the venue -- published, phone or on-line -- it strikes me as especially telling that schedules are part of the ordinariness of cinemagoing. To be sure, there are those who decide what film to see on site. Anecdotally, I have had several people comment recently that they no longer decide what movie to see, but where to see a (any) movie. Regardless, the schedule, coupled with the theatre's location, figures as a point of coordination for travel through community space to a site of film consumption. The choice of show time is governed by countless demands of everyday life. How often has the timing of a film -- not the film itself, the theatre at which it's playing, nor one's financial situation --determined one's attendance? How familiar is the assessment that show times are such that one cannot make it, that the film begins a bit too earlier, that it will run too late for whatever reason, and that other tasks intervene to take precedence? I want to make several observations related to the scheduling of film exhibition. Most generally, it makes manifest that cinemagoing involves an exercise in the application of cinema knowledge -- that is, minute, everyday facilities and familiarities that help orchestrate the ordinariness of cultural life. Such knowledge informs what Michel de Certeau characterises as "the procedures of everyday creativity" (xiv). Far from random, the unexceptional decisions and actions involved with cinemagoing bear an ordering and a predictability. Novelty in audience activity appears, but it is alongside fairly exact expectations about the event. The schedule of start times is essential to the routinisation of filmgoing. Displaying a Fordist logic of streamlining commodity distribution and the time management of consumption, audiences circulate through a machine that shapes their constituency, providing a set time for seating, departure, snack purchases and socialising. Even with the staggered times offered by multiplex cinemas, schedules still lay down a fixed template around which other activities have to be arrayed by the patron. As audiences move to and through the theatre, the schedule endeavours to regulate practice, making us the subjects of a temporal grid, a city context, a cinema space, as well as of the film itself. To be sure, one can arrive late and leave early, confounding the schedule's disciplining force. Most importantly, with or without such forms of evasion, it channels the actions of audiences in ways that consideration of the gaze cannot address. Taking account of the scheduling of cinema culture, and its implication of adjunct procedures of everyday life, points to dimensions of subjectivity neglected by dominant theories of spectatorship. To be the subject of a cinema schedule is to understand one assemblage of the parameters of everyday creativity. It would be foolish to see cinema audiences as cattle, herded and processed alone, in some crude Gustave LeBon fashion. It would be equally foolish not to recognise the manner in which film distribution and exhibition operates precisely by constructing images of the activity of people as demographic clusters and generalised cultural consumers. The ordinary tactics of filmgoing are supplemental to, and run alongside, a set of industrial structures and practices. While there is a correlation between a culture industry's imagined audience and the life that ensues around its offerings, we cannot neglect that, as attention to film scheduling alerts us, audiences are subjects of an institutional apparatus, brought into being for the reproduction of an industrial edifice. Streamline Audiences In this, film is no different from any culture industry. Film exhibition and distribution relies on an understanding of both the market and the product or service being sold at any given point in time. Operations respond to economic conditions, competing companies, and alternative activities. Economic rationality in this strategic process, however, only explains so much. This is especially true for an industry that must continually predict, and arguably give shape to, the "mood" and predilections of disparate and distant audiences. Producers, distributors and exhibitors assess which films will "work", to whom they will be marketed, as well as establish the very terms of success. Without a doubt, much of the film industry's attentions act to reduce this uncertainty; here, one need only think of the various forms of textual continuity (genre films, star performances, etc.) and the economies of mass advertising as ways to ensure box office receipts. Yet, at the core of the operations of film exhibition remains a number of flexible assumptions about audience activity, taste and desire. These assumptions emerge from a variety of sources to form a brand of temporary industry "commonsense", and as such are harbingers of an industrial logic. Ien Ang has usefully pursued this view in her comparative analysis of three national television structures and their operating assumptions about audiences. Broadcasters streamline and discipline audiences as part of their organisational procedures, with the consequence of shaping ideas about consumers as well as assuring the reproduction of the industrial structure itself. She writes, "institutional knowledge is driven toward making the audience visible in such a way that it helps the institutions to increase their power to get their relationship with the audience under control, and this can only be done by symbolically constructing 'television audience' as an objectified category of others that can be controlled, that is, contained in the interest of a predetermined institutional goal" (7). Ang demonstrates, in particular, how various industrially sanctioned programming strategies (programme strips, "hammocking" new shows between successful ones, and counter-programming to a competitor's strengths) and modes of audience measurement grow out of, and invariably support, those institutional goals. And, most crucially, her approach is not an effort to ascertain the empirical certainty of "actual" audiences; instead, it charts the discursive terrain in which the abstract concept of audience becomes material for the continuation of industry practices. Ang's work tenders special insight to film culture. In fact, television scholarship has taken full advantage of exploring the routine nature of that medium, the best of which deploys its findings to lay bare configurations of power in domestic contexts. One aspect has been television time and schedules. For example, David Morley points to the role of television in structuring everyday life, discussing a range of research that emphasises the temporal dimension. Alerting us to the non- necessary determination of television's temporal structure, he comments that we "need to maintain a sensitivity to these micro-levels of division and differentiation while we attend to the macro-questions of the media's own role in the social structuring of time" (265). As such, the negotiation of temporal structures implies that schedules are not monolithic impositions of order. Indeed, as Morley puts it, they "must be seen as both entering into already constructed, historically specific divisions of space and time, and also as transforming those pre-existing division" (266). Television's temporal grid has been address by others as well. Paddy Scannell characterises scheduling and continuity techniques, which link programmes, as a standardisation of use, making radio and television predictable, 'user friendly' media (9). John Caughie refers to the organization of flow as a way to talk about the national particularities of British and American television (49-50). All, while making their own contributions, appeal to a detailing of viewing context as part of any study of audience, consumption or experience; uncovering the practices of television programmers as they attempt to apprehend and create viewing conditions for their audiences is a first step in this detailing. Why has a similar conceptual framework not been applied with the same rigour to film? Certainly the history of film and television's association with different, at times divergent, disciplinary formations helps us appreciate such theoretical disparities. I would like to mention one less conspicuous explanation. It occurs to me that one frequently sees a collapse in the distinction between the everyday and the domestic; in much scholarship, the latter term appears as a powerful trope of the former. The consequence has been the absenting of a myriad of other -- if you will, non-domestic -- manifestations of everyday-ness, unfortunately encouraging a rather literal understanding of the everyday. The impression is that the abstractions of the everyday are reduced to daily occurrences. Simply put, my minor appeal is for the extension of this vein of television scholarship to out-of-home technologies and cultural forms, that is, other sites and locations of the everyday. In so doing, we pay attention to extra-textual structures of cinematic life; other regimes of knowledge, power, subjectivity and practice appear. Film audiences require a discussion about the ordinary, the calculated and the casual practices of cinematic engagement. Such a discussion would chart institutional knowledge, identifying operating strategies and recognising the creativity and multidimensionality of cinemagoing. What are the discursive parameters in which the film industry imagines cinema audiences? What are the related implications for the structures in which the practice of cinemagoing occurs? Vectors of Exhibition Time One set of those structures of audience and industry practice involves the temporal dimension of film exhibition. In what follows, I want to speculate on three vectors of the temporality of cinema spaces (meaning that I will not address issues of diegetic time). Note further that my observations emerge from a close study of industrial discourse in the U.S. and Canada. I would be interested to hear how they are manifest in other continental contexts. First, the running times of films encourage turnovers of the audience during the course of a single day at each screen. The special event of lengthy anomalies has helped mark the epic, and the historic, from standard fare. As discussed above, show times coordinate cinemagoing and regulate leisure time. Knowing the codes of screenings means participating in an extension of the industrial model of labour and service management. Running times incorporate more texts than the feature presentation alone. Besides the history of double features, there are now advertisements, trailers for coming attractions, trailers for films now playing in neighbouring auditoriums, promotional shorts demonstrating new sound systems, public service announcements, reminders to turn off cell phones and pagers, and the exhibitor's own signature clips. A growing focal point for filmgoing, these introductory texts received a boost in 1990, when the Motion Picture Association of America changed its standards for the length of trailers, boosting it from 90 seconds to a full two minutes (Brookman). This intertextuality needs to be supplemented by a consideration of inter- media appeals. For example, advertisements for television began appearing in theatres in the 1990s. And many lobbies of multiplex cinemas now offer a range of media forms, including video previews, magazines, arcades and virtual reality games. Implied here is that motion pictures are not the only media audiences experience in cinemas and that there is an explicit attempt to integrate a cinema's texts with those at other sites and locations. Thus, an exhibitor's schedule accommodates an intertextual strip, offering a limited parallel to Raymond Williams's concept of "flow", which he characterised by stating -- quite erroneously -- "in all communication systems before broadcasting the essential items were discrete" (86-7). Certainly, the flow between trailers, advertisements and feature presentations is not identical to that of the endless, ongoing text of television. There are not the same possibilities for "interruption" that Williams emphasises with respect to broadcasting flow. Further, in theatrical exhibition, there is an end-time, a time at which there is a public acknowledgement of the completion of the projected performance, one that necessitates vacating the cinema. This end-time is a moment at which the "rental" of the space has come due; and it harkens a return to the street, to the negotiation of city space, to modes of public transit and the mobile privatisation of cars. Nonetheless, a schedule constructs a temporal boundary in which audiences encounter a range of texts and media in what might be seen as limited flow. Second, the ephemerality of audiences -- moving to the cinema, consuming its texts, then passing the seat on to someone else -- is matched by the ephemerality of the features themselves. Distributors' demand for increasing numbers of screens necessary for massive, saturation openings has meant that films now replace one another more rapidly than in the past. Films that may have run for months now expect weeks, with fewer exceptions. Wider openings and shorter runs have created a cinemagoing culture characterised by flux. The acceleration of the turnover of films has been made possible by the expansion of various secondary markets for distribution, most importantly videotape, splintering where we might find audiences and multiplying viewing contexts. Speeding up the popular in this fashion means that the influence of individual texts can only be truly gauged via cross-media scrutiny. Short theatrical runs are not axiomatically designed for cinemagoers anymore; they can also be intended to attract the attention of video renters, purchasers and retailers. Independent video distributors, especially, "view theatrical release as a marketing expense, not a profit center" (Hindes & Roman 16). In this respect, we might think of such theatrical runs as "trailers" or "loss leaders" for the video release, with selected locations for a film's release potentially providing visibility, even prestige, in certain city markets or neighbourhoods. Distributors are able to count on some promotion through popular consumer- guide reviews, usually accompanying theatrical release as opposed to the passing critical attention given to video release. Consequently, this shapes the kinds of uses an assessment of the current cinema is put to; acknowledging that new releases function as a resource for cinema knowledge highlights the way audiences choose between and determine big screen and small screen films. Taken in this manner, popular audiences see the current cinema as largely a rough catalogue to future cultural consumption. Third, motion picture release is part of the structure of memories and activities over the course of a year. New films appear in an informal and ever-fluctuating structure of seasons. The concepts of summer movies and Christmas films, or the opening weekends that are marked by a holiday, sets up a fit between cinemagoing and other activities -- family gatherings, celebrations, etc. Further, this fit is presumably resonant for both the industry and popular audiences alike, though certainly for different reasons. The concentration of new films around visible holiday periods results in a temporally defined dearth of cinemas; an inordinate focus upon three periods in the year in the U.S. and Canada -- the last weekend in May, June/July/August and December -- creates seasonal shortages of screens (Rice-Barker 20). In fact, the boom in theatre construction through the latter half of the 1990s was, in part, to deal with those short-term shortages and not some year-round inadequate seating. Configurations of releasing colour a calendar with the tactical manoeuvres of distributors and exhibitors. Releasing provides a particular shape to the "current cinema", a term I employ to refer to a temporally designated slate of cinematic texts characterised most prominently by their newness. Television arranges programmes to capitalise on flow, to carry forward audiences and to counter-programme competitors' simultaneous offerings. Similarly, distributors jostle with each other, with their films and with certain key dates, for the limited weekends available, hoping to match a competitor's film intended for one audience with one intended for another. Industry reporter Leonard Klady sketched some of the contemporary truisms of releasing based upon the experience of 1997. He remarks upon the success of moving Liar, Liar (Tom Shadyac, 1997) to a March opening and the early May openings of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (Jay Roach, 1997) and Breakdown (Jonathan Mostow, 1997), generally seen as not desirable times of the year for premieres. He cautions against opening two films the same weekend, and thus competing with yourself, using the example of Fox's Soul Food (George Tillman, Jr., 1997) and The Edge (Lee Tamahori, 1997). While distributors seek out weekends clear of films that would threaten to overshadow their own, Klady points to the exception of two hits opening on the same date of December 19, 1997 -- Tomorrow Never Dies (Roger Spottiswoode, 1997) and Titanic (James Cameron, 1997). Though but a single opinion, Klady's observations are a peek into a conventional strain of strategising among distributors and exhibitors. Such planning for the timing and appearance of films is akin to the programming decisions of network executives. And I would hazard to say that digital cinema, reportedly -- though unlikely -- just on the horizon and in which texts will be beamed to cinemas via satellite rather than circulated in prints, will only augment this comparison; releasing will become that much more like programming, or at least will be conceptualised as such. To summarize, the first vector of exhibition temporality is the scheduling and running time; the second is the theatrical run; the third is the idea of seasons and the "programming" of openings. These are just some of the forces streamlining filmgoers; the temporal structuring of screenings, runs and film seasons provides a material contour to the abstraction of audience. Here, what I have delineated are components of an industrial logic about popular and public entertainment, one that offers a certain controlled knowledge about and for cinemagoing audiences. Shifting Conceptual Frameworks A note of caution is in order. I emphatically resist an interpretation that we are witnessing the becoming-film of television and the becoming-tv of film. Underneath the "inversion" argument is a weak brand of technological determinism, as though each asserts its own essential qualities. Such a pat declaration seems more in line with the mythos of convergence, and its quasi-Darwinian "natural" collapse of technologies. Instead, my point here is quite the opposite, that there is nothing essential or unique about the scheduling or flow of television; indeed, one does not have to look far to find examples of less schedule-dependent television. What I want to highlight is that application of any term of distinction -- event/flow, gaze/glance, public/private, and so on -- has more to do with our thinking, with the core discursive arrangements that have made film and television, and their audiences, available to us as knowable and different. So, using empirical evidence to slide one term over to the other is a strategy intended to supplement and destabilise the manner in which we draw conclusions, and even pose questions, of each. What this proposes is, again following the contributions of Ien Ang, that we need to see cinemagoing in its institutional formation, rather than some stable technological, textual or experiential apparatus. The activity is not only a function of a constraining industrial practice or of wildly creative patrons, but of a complex inter-determination between the two. Cinemagoing is an organisational entity harbouring, reviving and constituting knowledge and commonsense about film commodities, audiences and everyday life. An event of cinema begins well before the dimming of an auditorium's lights. The moment a newspaper is consulted, with its local representation of an internationally circulating current cinema, its listings belie a scheduling, an orderliness, to the possible projections in a given location. As audiences are formed as subjects of the current cinema, we are also agents in the continuation of a set of institutions as well. References Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. New York: Routledge, 1991. Brookman, Faye. "Trailers: The Big Business of Drawing Crowds." Variety 13 June 1990: 48. Caughie, John. "Playing at Being American: Games and Tactics." Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steve Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Hindes, Andrew, and Monica Roman. "Video Titles Do Pitstops on Screens." Variety 16-22 Sep. 1996: 11+. Klady, Leonard. "Hitting and Missing the Market: Studios Show Savvy -- or Just Luck -- with Pic Release Strategies." Variety 19-25 Jan. 1998: 18. Morley, David. Television, Audiences and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992. Newspaper Association of America. "Before They See It Here..." Advertisement. Variety 22-28 Nov. 1999: 38. Rice-Barker, Leo. "Industry Banks on New Technology, Expanded Slates." Playback 6 May 1996: 19-20. Scannell, Paddy. Radio, Television and Modern Life. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. New York: Schocken, 1975. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Charles Acland. "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.1 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php>. Chicago style: Charles Acland, "Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 1 (2000), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Charles Acland. (2000) Matinees, Summers and Opening Weekends: Cinemagoing Audiences as Institutional Subjects. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(1). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/0003/cinema.php> ([your date of access]).

Exhibiting Procedural Generation Generative art toys are software applications that create aesthetically pleasing visual patterns in response to the users toying with various input devices, from keyboard and mouse to more intuitive and tactile devices for motion tracking. The “art” part of these toy objects might relate to the fact that they are often installed in art galleries or festivals as a spectacle for non-players that exhibits the unlimited generation of new patterns from a limited source code. However, the features that used to characterise generative arts as a new meditative genre, such as the autonomy of the algorithmic system and its self-organisation (Galanter 151), do not explain the pleasure of fiddling with these playthings, which feel sticky like their toy relatives, slime, rather than meditative, like mathematical sublime. Generative algorithms are more than software tools to serve human purposes now. While humans are still responsible for the algorithmically generated content, this is either to the extent of the simple generation rules the artists design for their artworks or only to the extent that our everyday conversations and behaviours serve as raw material to train machine learning-powered generation algorithms, such as ChatGPT, to interpret the world they explore stochastically, extrapolating it in an equivalently statistical way. Yet, as the algorithms become more responsive to the contingency of human behaviours, and so the trained generation rules become too complex, it becomes almost impossible for humans to understand how they translate all contingencies in the real world into machine-learnable correlations. In turn, the way we are entangled with the generated content comes to far exceed our responsibility. One disturbing future scenario of this hyper-responsiveness of the algorithms, for which we could never be fully responsible, is when machine-generated content replaces the ground truth sampled from the real world, leading to the other machine learning-powered software tools that govern human behaviour being trained on these “synthetic data” (Steinhoff). The multiplicities of human worlds are substituted for their algorithmically generated proxies, and the AIs trained instead on the proxies’ stochastic complexities would tell us how to design our future behaviours. As one aesthetic way to demonstrate the creativity of the machines, generative arts have exhibited generative algorithms in a somewhat decontextualised and thus less threatening manner by “emphasizing the circularity of autopoietic processes” of content generation (Hayles 156). Their current toy conversion playfully re-contextualises how these algorithms in real life, incarnated into toy-like gadgets, both enact and are enacted by human users. These interactions not only form random seeds for content generation but also constantly re-entangle generated contents with contingent human behaviors. The toy-being of generative algorithms I conceptualise here is illustrative of this changed mode of their exhibition. They move from displaying generative algorithms as speculative objects at a distance to sticky toy objects up close and personal: from emphasising their autopoietic closure to “more open-ended and transformative” engagement with their surroundings (Hayles 156). (Katherine Hayles says this changed focus in the research of artificial life/intelligence from the systems’ auto-poietic self-closure to their active engagement with environments characterises “the transition from the second to the third wave” of cybernetics; 17.) Their toy-being also reflects how the current software industry repurposes these algorithms, once developed for automation of content creation with no human intervention, as machines that enact commercially promising entanglements between contingent human behaviors and a mixed-reality that is algorithmically generated. Tool-Being and Toy-Being of Generative Algorithms What I mean by toy-being is a certain mode of existence in which a thing appears when our habitual sensorimotor relations with it are temporarily suspended. It is comparable to what Graham Harman calls a thing’s tool-being in his object-oriented rereading of Heidegger’s tool analysis. In that case, this thing’s becoming either a toy or tool pertains to how our hands are entangled with its ungraspable aspects. According to Heidegger a hammer, for instance, is ready-to-hand when its reactions to our grip, and swinging, and to the response from the nail, are fully integrated into our habitual action of hammering to the extent that its stand-alone existence is almost unnoticeable (Tool-Being). On the other hand, it is when the hammer breaks down, or slips out of our grasp, that it begins to feel present-at-hand. For Harman, this is the moment the hammer reveals its own way to be in the world, outside of our instrumentalist concern. It is the hint of the hammer’s “subterranean reality”, which is inexhaustible by any practical and theoretical concerns we have of it (“Well-Wrought” 186). It is unconstrained by the pragmatic maxim that any conception of an object should be grounded in the consequences of what it does or what can be done with it (Peirce). In Harman’s object-oriented ontology, neither the hammer’s being ready to serve any purpose of human and nonhuman others – nor its being present as an object with its own social, economic, and material histories – explicate its tool-being exhaustively. Instead, it always preserves more than the sum of the relations it has ever built with others throughout its lifetime. So, the mode of existence that describes best this elusive tool-being for him is withdrawing-from-hand. Generative art toys are noteworthy regarding this ever-switching and withdrawing mode of things on which Harman and other speculative realists focus. In the Procedural Content Generation (PCG) community, the current epicentre of generative art toys, which consists of videogame developers and researchers, these software applications are repurposed from the development tools they aim to popularise through this toy conversion. More importantly, procedural algorithms are not ordinary tools ready to be an extension of a developer’s hands, just as traditional level design tools follow Ivan Suntherland’s 1963 Sketchpad archetype. Rather, procedural generation is an autopoietic process through which the algorithm organises its own representation of the world from recursively generated geographies, characters, events, and other stuff. And this representation does not need to be a truthful interpretation of its environments, which are no other than generation parameters and other input data from the developer. Indeed, they “have only a triggering role in the release of the internally-determined activity” of content generation. The representation it generates suffices to be just “structurally coupled” with these developer-generated data (Hayles 136, 138). In other words, procedural algorithms do not break down to be felt present-at-hand because they always feel as though their operations are closed against their environments-developers. Furthermore, considered as the solution to the ever-increasing demand for the more expansive and interactive sandbox design of videogames, they not only promise developers unlimited regeneration of content for another project but promise players a virtual reality, which constantly changes its shape while always appearing perfectly coupled with different decisions made by avatars, and thus promise unlimited replayability of the videogame. So, it is a common feeling of playing a videogame with procedurally generated content or a story that evolves in real time that something is constantly withdrawing from the things the player just grasped. (The most vicious way to exploit this gamer feeling would be the in-game sale of procedurally generated items, such as weapons with many re-combinable parts, instead of the notorious loot-box that sells a random item from the box, but with the same effect of leading gamers to a gambling addiction by letting them believe there is still something more.) In this respect, it is not surprising that Harman terms his object-oriented ontology after object-oriented programming in computer science. Both look for an inexhaustible resource for the creative generation of the universe and algorithmic systems from the objects infinitely relatable to one another thanks ironically to the secret inner realities they enclose against each other. Fig. 1: Kate Compton, Idle Hands. http://galaxykate.com/apps/idlehands/ However, the toy-being of the algorithms, which I rediscover from the PCG community’s playful conversion of their development tools and which Harman could not pay due attention to while holding on to the self-identical tool-being, is another mode of existence that all tools, or all things before they were instrumentalised, including even the hammer, had used to be in children’s hands. For instance, in Kate Compton’s generative art toy Idle Hands (fig. 1), what a player experiences is her hand avatar, every finger and joint of which is infinitely extended into the space, even as they also serve as lines into which the space is infinitely folded. So, as the player clenches and unclenches her physical hands, scanned in real-time by the motion tracking device Leapmotion, and interpreted into linear input for the generation algorithm, the space is constantly folded and refolded everywhere even by the tiniest movement of a single joint. There is nothing for her hands to grasp onto because nothing is ready to respond consistently to her repeated hand gestures. It is almost impossible to replicate the exact same gesture but, even if she does, the way the surrounding area is folded by this would be always unpredictable. Put differently, in this generative art toy, the player cannot functionally close her sensorimotor activity. This is not so much because of the lack of response, but because it is Compton’s intention to render the whole “fields of the performer” as hyperresponsive to “a body in motion” as if “the dancer wades through water or smoke or tall grass, if they disturb [the] curtain as they move” (Compton and Mateas). At the same time, the constant re-generation of the space as a manifold is no longer felt like an autonomous self-creation of the machine but arouses the feeling that “all of these phenomena ‘listen’ to the movement of the [hands] and respond in some way” (Compton and Mateas). Let me call this fourth mode of things, neither ready-to-hand nor present-at-hand, nor withdrawing-from-hand, but sticky-to-hand: describing a thing’s toy-being. This is so entangled with the hands that its response to our grasp is felt immediately, on every surface and joint, so that it is impossible to anticipate exactly how it would respond to further grasping or releasing. It is a typical feeling of the hand toying with a chunk of clay or slime. It characterises the hypersensitivity of the autistic perception that some neurodiverse people may have, even to ordinary tools, not because they have closed their minds against the world as the common misunderstanding says, but because even the tiniest pulsations that things exert to their moving bodies are too overwhelming to be functionally integrated into their habitual sensorimotor activities let alone to be unentangled as present-at-hand (Manning). In other words, whereas Heideggerian tool-being, for Harman, draws our attention to the things outside of our instrumentalist concern, their toyfication puts the things that were once under our grip back into our somewhat animistic interests of childhood. If our agency as tool-users presupposes our body’s optimal grip on the world that Hubert Dreyfus defines as “the body’s tendency to refine its responses so as to bring the current situation closer to an optimal gestalt” (367), our becoming toy-players is when we feel everything is responsive to each other until that responsiveness is trivialised as the functional inputs for habitual activities. We all once felt things like these animistic others, before we were trained to be tool-users, and we may consequently recall a forgotten genealogy of toy-being in the humanities. This genealogy may begin with a cotton reel in Freud’s fort-da game, while also including such things as jubilant mirror doubles and their toy projections in Lacanian psychoanalysis, various playthings in Piaget’s development theory, and all non-tool-beings in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. To trace this genealogy is not this article’s goal but the family resemblance that groups these things under the term toy-being is noteworthy. First, they all pertain to a person’s individuation processes at different stages, whether it be for the symbolic and tactile re-staging of a baby’s separation from her mother, her formation of a unified self-image from the movements of different body parts, the child’s organisation of object concepts from tactile and visual feedbacks of touching and manipulating hands, the subsequent “projection of such ‘symbolic schemas’” as social norms, as Barbie’s and Ken’s, onto these objects (Piaget 165-166), or a re-doing of all these developmental processes through aesthetic assimilation of objects as the flesh of the worlds (Merleau-Ponty). And these individuations through toys seem to approach the zero-degree of human cognition in which a body (either human or nonhuman) is no other than a set of loosely interconnected sensors and motors. In this zero-degree, the body’s perception or optimal grip on things is achieved as the ways each thing responds to the body’s motor activities are registered on its sensors as something retraceable, repeatable, and thus graspable. In other words, there is no predefined subject/object boundary here but just multiplicities of actions and sensations until a group of sensors and motors are folded together to assemble a reflex arc, or what Merleau-Ponty calls intention arc (Dreyfus), or what I term sensor-actuator arc in current smart spaces (Ahn). And it is when some groups of sensations are distinguished as those consistently correlated with and thus retraceable by certain operations of the body that this fold creates an optimal grip on the rest of the field. Let me call this enfolding of the multiplicities whereby “the marking of the ‘measuring agencies’ by the ‘measured object’” emerges prior to the interaction between two, following Karen Barad, intra-action (177). Contrary to the experience of tool-being present-at-hand as no longer consistently contributing to our habitually formed reflex arc of hammering or to any socially constructed measuring agencies for normative behaviors of things, what we experience with this toy-being sticky-to-hand is our bodies’ folding into the multiplicities of actions and sensations, to discover yet unexplored boundaries and grasping between our bodies and the flesh of the world. Generative Art Toys as the Machine Learning’s Daydream Then, can I say even the feeling I have on my hands while I am folding and refolding the slime is intra-action? I truly think so, but the multiplicities in this case are so sticky. They join to every surface of my hands whereas the motility under my conscious control is restricted only to several joints of my fingers. The real-life multiplicities unfolded from toying with the slime are too overwhelming to be relatable to my actions with the restricted degree of freedom. On the other hand, in Compton’s Idle Hands, thanks to the manifold generated procedurally in virtual reality, a player experiences these multiplicities so neatly entangled with all the joints on the avatar hands. Rather than simulating a meaty body enfolded within “water or smoke or tall grass,” or the flesh of the world, the physical hands scanned by Leapmotion and abstracted into “3D vector positions for all finger joints” are embedded in the paper-like virtual space of Idle Hands (Compton and Mateas). And rather than delineating a boundary of the controlling hands, they are just the joints on this immanent plane, through which it is folded into itself in so many fantastic ways impossible on a sheet of paper in Euclidean geometry. Another toy relative which Idle Hands reminds us of is, in this respect, Cat’s Cradle (fig. 2). This play of folding a string entangled around the fingers into itself over and over again to unfold each new pattern is, for Donna Haraway, a metaphor for our creative cohabitation of the world with nonhuman others. Feeling the tension the fingers exchange with each other across the string is thus, for her, compared to “our task” in the Anthropocene “to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” (Haraway 1). Fig. 2: Nasser Mufti, Multispecies Cat's Cradle, 2011. https://www.kit.ntnu.no/sites/www.kit.ntnu.no/files/39a8af529d52b3c35ded2aa1b5b0cb0013806720.jpg In the alternative, in Idle Hands, each new pattern is easily unfolded even from idle and careless finger movements without any troubled feeling, because its procedural generation is to guarantee that every second of the player’s engagement is productive and wasteless relation-making. In Compton’s terms, the pleasure of generative art toys is relevant to the players’ decision to trade the control they once enjoyed as tool users for power. And this tricky kind of power that the players are supposed to experience is not because of their strong grip, but because they give up this strong grip. It is explicable as the experience of being re-embedded as a fold within this intra-active field of procedural generation: the feeling that even seemingly purposeless activities can make new agential cuts as the triggers for some artistic creations (“Generative Art Toys” 164-165), even though none of these creations are graspable or traceable by the players. The procedural algorithm as the new toy-being is, therefore, distinguishable from its non-digital toy relatives by this easy feeling of engagement that all generated patterns are wastelessly correlated with the players’ sensorimotor activities in some ungraspable ways. And given the machine learning community’s current interest in procedural generation as the method to “create more training data or training situations” and “to facilitate the transfer of policies trained in a simulator to the real world” (Risi and Togelius 428, 430), the pleasure of generative art toys can be interpreted as revealing the ideal picture of the mixed-reality dreamed of by machine learning algorithms. As the solution to circumvent the issue of data privacy in surveillance capitalism, and to augment the lack of diversity in existing training data, the procedurally generated synthetic data are now considered as the new benchmarks for machine learning instead of those sampled from the real world. This is not just about a game-like object for a robot to handle, or geographies of fictional terrains for a smart vehicle to navigate (Risi and Togelius), but is more about “little procedural people” (“Little Procedural People”), “synthetic data for banking, insurance, and telecommunications companies” (Steinhoff 8). In the near future, as the AIs trained solely on these synthetic data begin to guide our everyday decision-making, the mixed-reality will thus be more than just a virtual layer of the Internet superimposed on the real world but haunted by so many procedurally generated places, things, and people. Compared to the real world, still too sticky like slime, machine learning could achieve an optimal grip on this virtual layer because things are already generated there under the assumption that they are all entangled with one another by some as yet unknown correlations that machine learning is supposed to unfold. Then the question recalled by this future scenario of machine learning would be again Philip K. Dick’s: Do the machines dream of (procedurally generated) electronic sheep? Do they rather dream of this easy wish fulfillment in place of playing an arduous Cat’s Cradle with humans to discover more patterns to commodify between what our eyes attend to and what our fingers drag and click? Incarnated into toy-like gadgets on mobile devices, machine learning algorithms relocate their users to the zero-degree of social profiles, which is no other than yet-unstructured personal data supposedly responsive to (and responsible for regenerating) invisible arcs, or correlations, between things they watch and things they click. In the meanwhile, what the generative art toys really generate might be the self-fulfilling hope of the software industry that machines could generate their mixed-reality, so neatly and wastelessly engaged with the idle hands of human users, the dream of electronic sheep under the maximal grip of Android (as well as iOS). References Ahn, Sungyong. “Stream Your Brain! Speculative Economy of the IoT and Its Pan-Kinetic Dataveillance.” Big Data & Society 8.2 (2021). Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. Compton, Kate. “Generative Art Toys.” Procedural Generation in Game Design, eds. Tanya Short and Tarn Adams. New York: CRC Press, 2017. 161-173. Compton, Kate. “Little Procedural People: Playing Politics with Generators.” Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games, eds. Alessandro Canossa, Casper Harteveld, Jichen Zhu, Miguel Sicart, and Sebastian Deterding. New York: ACM, 2017. Compton, Kate, and Michael Mateas. “Freedom of Movement: Generative Responses to Motion Control.” CEUR Workshop Proceedings, 2282, ed. Jichen Zhu. Aachen: CEUR-WS, 2018. Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Intelligence without Representation: Merleau-Ponty’s Critique of Mental Representation.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 1 (2002): 367-383. Galanter, Philip. “Generative Art Theory.” A Companion to Digital Art, ed. Christiane Paul. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016. 146-180. Haraway, Donna J. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Harman, Graham. Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects. Chicago: Open Court, 2002. ———. “The Well-Wrought Broken Hammer: Object-Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 183-203. Hayles, Katherine N. How We Become Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literatures, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham: Duke UP, 2016. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Visible and the Invisible. Ed. Claude Lefort. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1968. Peirce, Charles S. “How to Make Our Ideas Clear.” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1878): 286-302. Piaget, Jean. Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood. Trans. C. Gattegno and F.M. Hodgson. New York: W.W. Norton, 1962. Risi, Sebastian, and Julian Togelius. “Increasing Generality in Machine Learning through Procedural Content Generation.” Nature Machine Intelligence 2 (2020): 428-436. Steinhoff, James. “Toward a Political Economy of Synthetic Data: A Data-Intensive Capitalism That Is Not a Surveillance Capitalism?” New Media and Society, 2022.

One of the writers of this paper visited America at the end of the ‘90s and came across a curious translation dilemma as a foreigner. In some of the seemingly inauspicious districts of the city, there were signs saying “No Loitering” on the displays of shops or walls of residencies. These signs were causing anxiety for her, because she did not know the actual meaning of the phrase of “No Loitering”. (Her dictionary was still packed away.) Apart from being curious about the meaning of the phrase, she was rather afraid of performing “the act of loitering” since she had no idea what it meant. When she was settled she looked up to the meaning of the term “loitering”: “waiting, hanging around, lingering, dallying, etc…” (Oxford Encyclopedia). The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English defined “to loiter” as “to stand in a public place, usually with no particular or obvious purpose.” Based on this, if a person spends time hanging around or dallying in a public place with no purpose, the act of this person is called “loitering”. In the eyes of the newcomer, we suggest that “loitering” might be equal to more or less “doing nothing”. A person who is acting in the way described is almost inactive. When we view the issue from this framework, the person does not seem to be doing anything dangerous or precarious. In essence, what right or reason does someone have to command another “do not stand here”? Actually, a person who comes across such a warning can comfortably (if ironically) say that they are doing “nothing”. Loitering as a Sign of “Doing Nothing” From a semiological point of view, loitering can be seen as an honest act that reveals its intent of doing nothing by itself, because by definition loitering indicates to a lack of purpose and inactivity. On the other hand, loitering does not conjure up innocence associated with a natural state of inactivity. In fact, it conjures up possible danger, threat and crime. It does not signify doing nothing, but on the contrary it points to the possibility of being able to do “a very bad thing”. Closest to its definition, loitering might seem like an honest act; it can also be considered as the interval between inactivity and possible negative action. In this respect, loitering can be seen as the double-layered mythological sign of Barthes: namely, loitering at a denotative level is coded as innocent and honest – doing nothing signifies doing nothing. However, ideologically at a connotative level, loitering reveals itself as an action by which doing nothing is turned into doing something. Within this setting, if we accept that the subject does loiter with a “bad intention”, we can observe that the seemingly innocent acts of “lingering” and “dallying” can easily turn into proper camouflage instruments that conceal these “bad intentions”. Doing nothing can be considered to function as a curtain that briefly conceals the act of doing something or the possibility of doing something. Within this scope, loitering can also be a direct representation of a slippery possibility. We recall a specific type of postcards which was once quite fashionable. The characteristic of these postcards is to allow us to see two different images on the same surface. When those postcards are viewed from a definite angle you can see a picture of, for example, New York which is taken in daylight, and when viewed from another angle, this time the night vision of the same setting can be observed. When loitering is in question, there is a similar mechanism at work. The idea that we want to point out is that, due to the slippery nature of the category of the term loitering, neither of these pictures – each one depicting one side of the term – can be absolute. This is because of the permeable nature of these pictures. In fact, what is “real” is the very act of changing the angle while viewing the pictures: to be able to see the two pictures/definitions simultaneously. Loitering is a real conjunction point, a transformation point that we can not grasp between the two pictures/definitions: an interval point of innocent acts of dallying, lingering, and a threatening act of crime. In other words, between being a mythological and a denotative sign, loitering is the sign of possibility itself. The dominant paradigm of modern urban life defines “non-functionality” as inauspicious, immobile and therefore risky. Loitering can also be coupled with non-functionality, and this association would have two consequences: firstly the perception of the term alters toward a negative tone; secondly it opens up an area where we can discuss the body, the city and the concept of movement respectively: The loitering human body which is alive but non-functional in the public space brings to mind a series of possibilities that originate from a potential energy which is not in use. This is usually taken to be something “bad”. Namely, a person who loiters is not expected to give money to a beggar, but is often seen as likely to seize money from another person by violence. A city is a system depending on flow. In other words, it is a system depending on the flow of vehicles, people, goods, money and waste. For such a system depending on movement there is no place for stability. Thus, individuals should either take part in this flow or they should not act as a point of resistance that would be an obstacle to the movement. The late capitalist period has a “psychic” effect on urban life and individuals. Recently, this effect has been discussed with other approaches within discussions around the concept of Risk Society. Risk Society starts where the systems of security norms do not function against the threats (Beck). It is located in a new definition of modernity in which risks that are related to economic initiatives, security of employment, health and environment have increased intensively. Abundance of possibilities and uncertainties, and polysemy in Risk Society, create an intensive agenda. Concerning the psychological implications of Risk Society on individuals and their acts, Beck argues that our horizon also darkens due to risks. Hence, risks say what should not be done, but not what should be done. Risk management demands that precaution is taken through avoidance. A person who designs the world as a risk loses their ability to act in the end. The remarkable aspect of this development is that the increase in the intention of control turns this intention into its opposite (Beck). In this context, loitering can be considered as one of the risks in everyday life due to its ambiguous definition and perception. Returning to the earlier quote from Beck, the visuality of the “No Loitering” sign which tells what should be avoided or what should not be done in a commanding tone identifies a “risk zone”. In fact, while this sign functions to warn people concerning the area that the act of loitering can take place, it also embodies, constructs and strengthens the possibility of risk. Is Loitering a Crime? The prejudice supposing that loitering is dangerous reveals itself strikingly in legal matters. The “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law, which was approved in 1992, allowed police to arrest persons who “remain in any one place with no apparent purpose” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”) in the presence of a suspected gang member and who then fail to disperse satisfactorily when warned by police. Thus, it is possible for perceived loiterers to be arrested under the same law, although it is not proven that these people had been previously convicted of a crime, had committed a crime before their arrest, or were planning to commit an offence. “Before lower courts found the law unconstitutional in 1995, Chicago police issued 89,000 dispersal orders under the ordinance and made 42,000 arrests. The majority of people arrested were black or Latino” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”). A group of justices considers the freedom to loiter a part of constitutional right. For example, Justice John Paul Stevens said, ‘the freedom to loiter for innocent purposes is part of the liberty’ protected by the U.S. Constitution. People in Chicago who stop to ‘engage in idle conversation or simply enjoy a cool breeze on a warm evening’ should not be subject to police commands. (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”) The second group claims that “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law did not focus on specific criminal conduct and suggests that Chicago city lawyers redrafted this law to make it illegal to loiter, to “establish control over identifiable areas or to intimidate others from entering those areas” (“High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law”). They argue that the lawyers are obliged to bring onto the agenda a better definition of the conduct for it to be accepted as a criminal act. A U.S. Constitutional Court abolished the “Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering” law in 1999, with ongoing discussions over the complicated nature of the issue. The legal uncertainty in the concept of loitering proves that the foreigner who had difficulties in understanding the notion was right in her concerns. All these things strikingly point to the possibility that somebody who is hanging around, chatting or lingering on a beautiful day can be arrested at any moment. The main reason the term “loiter” is obscure to the foreigner is not only because of the definitive meaning of loitering, but because the ambiguity of the term is still preserved after that. Thus, the person still has some hesitations about whether her behavior belongs to this category. The reason for her hesitation is based on the suspicion she has: she only intended to relax, dally and hang around (loiter); however, all those behaviors could be read (perceived) to suggest that she is about to engage in a criminal “bad” act. While the concept of social perception, which refers to the initial stage of evaluating the intentions of others using their body movements, hand gestures, facial expressions, and other biological motion cues (Allison, Puce and McCarthy), would explain the reason behind this reading, it is also possible to suggest that this kind of reading is conveyed by broader social norms. So, the problem which the foreigner experienced is the difficulty to create signs of doing nothing differentiating from the behaviors which are perceived as socially unacceptable. Last Word Nothing is the definition of a void. The aim of this essay is to discuss how loitering makes this void visible and representable. As defined earlier, a sign is a surface of meaning, an interface. Doing nothing, which is an intellectual or philosophical category, is represented in different ways in different cultures by some acts which form interfaces, and sometimes it is made visible. When signs of doing nothing are being discussed, one of the most important problems is related to defining and naming the acts. As congruent with the purpose of doing nothing, loitering would be the best representation of doing nothing. However, even if loitering does not include an intention to harm, it is considered that the state of danger continues since it is rather difficult to make this visible and comprehensible through bodily signs. Loitering is a state of inactivity, incapable of creating the signs that will make its intention obvious. Yet it signifies the storm itself by being perceived as the silence before the storm. References Allison, Truett, Aina Puce, and Gregory McCarthy. “Social Perception from Visual Cues: Roles of the STS region”. Trends in Cognitive Science 4 (2000): 267-278. Barthes, Roland. “Myth Today.” Mythologies. Trans. Annette Lavers. London: Vintage, 1990. Beck, Ulrich. The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order. Trans. M. Ritter. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997. “High Court Rejects Chicago Anti-Gang Loitering Law” 17 July 2006. http://www.ndsn.org/summer99/courts3.html>. Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary of Current English. Ed. J. Crowther. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Oxford Encyclopedia English-Turkish Dictionary. Ä°stanbul: Sabah, 1990. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Timur, Sebnem, and Melike Turkan Bagli. "A Bodily Sign of “Doing Nothing”: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm." M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/05-timur-bagli.php>. APA Style Timur, S., and M. Bagli. (Jul. 2006) "A Bodily Sign of “Doing Nothing”: Loitering or the Silence before the Storm," M/C Journal, 9(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/05-timur-bagli.php>.

In the summer of 1944, American Sergeant Paul Dorsey was hired by the Naval Aviation Photography Unit (NAPU) to capture “the Marines’ bitter struggle against their determined foe” in the Pacific islands (Philips 43). Dorsey had been a photographer and photojournalist before enlisting in the Marines, and was thus well placed to fulfil the NAPU’s remit of creating positive images of American forces in the Pacific. Under the editorial and professional guidance of Edward Steichen, NAPU photographers like Dorsey provided epic images of battle (especially from the air and sea), and also showed American forces at ease – sunbathing, swimming, drinking and relaxing together (Bachner At Ease; Bachner Men of WWII). Steichen – by now a lieutenant commander – oversaw the entire NAPU project by developing, choosing and editing the images, and also providing captions for their reproduction in popular newspapers and magazines such as LIFE. Under his guidance, selected NAPU images were displayed at the famous Power in the Pacific exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York at the end of the war, and distributed in the popular U.S. Navy War Photographs memorial book which sold over 6 million copies in 1945.While the original NAPU photographers (Steichen himself, Charles Kerlee, Horace Bristol, Wayne Miller, Charles Fenno Jacobs, Victor Jorgensen and Dwight Long) had been at work in the Pacific since the summer of 1942, Dorsey was hired specifically to document the advance of American Marines through the Marianas and Volcano Islands. In line with the NAPU’s remit, Dorsey provided a number of famous rear view shots of combat action on Guam, Saipan and Iwo Jima. However, there are a number of his photographs that do not fit easily within that vision of war – images of wounded Marines and dead Japanese soldiers, as well as shots of abject Japanese POWs with their heads bowed and faces averted. It is this last group of enemy images that proves the most interesting, for not only do they trouble NAPU’s explicit propaganda framework, they also challenge our traditional assumption that photography is an inert form of representation.It is not hard to imagine that photographs of abject Japanese POWs reinforced feelings of triumph, conquest and justice that circulated in America’s post-war victory culture. Indeed, images of emaciated and incarcerated Japanese soldiers provided the perfect contrast to the hyper-masculine, hard-bodied, beefcake figures that populated the NAPU photographs and symbolized American power in the Pacific. However, once Japan was rehabilitated into a powerful American ally, and the decision to drop the atomic bomb was questioned once again in America’s Culture Wars of the 1980s and 90s, it was no longer acceptable to feel triumphant in the face of Japanese abjection and suffering. Instead, these images helped foster a new kind of belated patriotism – and a new global disposition – in which Americans generated their own magnanimity by expressing pity, compassion and sympathy for victims of their previous foreign policy decisions (Lisle).While that patriotic interpretive framework tells us much about how dominant formations of American identity are secured by the production – especially the visual production – of enemy others, it cannot account for images or viewer interpretations that exceed, unwork, or disrupt war’s foundational logics of friend/enemy and perpetrator/victim. I focus on Dorsey because he offers one such ‘deviant’ image: This photograph was taken by Dorsey on Guam in July 1944, and its caption tells us that the Japanese prisoner “waits to be questioned by intelligence officers” (Philips 189). As the POW looks into Dorsey’s camera lens (and therefore at us, the viewers), he is subject to the collective gaze of the American marines situated behind him, and presumably others that lay out of the frame, behind Dorsey. What is fascinating about this particular image is the prisoner’s refusal to obey the trope of abjection so readily assumed by other Japanese POWs documented in the NAPU archive and in other popular war-time imagery. Indeed, when I first encountered this image I immediately framed the POW’s return gaze as defiant – a challenging, bold, and forceful reply to American aggression in the Pacific. The problem, of course, was that this resistant gaze soon became reductive; that is, by replicating war’s foundational logics of difference it effaced a number of other dispositions at work in the photograph. What I find compelling about the POW’s return gaze is its refusal to be contained within the available subject positions of either ‘abject POW’ or ‘defiant resistor’. Indeed, this unruliness is what keeps me coming back to Dorsey’s image, for it teaches us that photography itself always exceeds the conventional assumption that it is a static form of visual representation.Photography, Animation, MovementThe connections between movement, stillness and photography have two important starting points. The first, and more general, is Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectic image in which the past and the present come together “in a flash” and constitute what he calls “dialectics at a standstill” (N3.1; 463). Unlike Theodore Adorno, who lamented Benjamin’s Medusa-like tendency to turn the world to stone, I read Benjamin’s concept of standstill – of stillness in general – as something fizzing and pulsating with “political electricity” (Adorno 227-42; Buck-Morss 219). This is to deny our most basic assumption about photography: that it is an inert visual form that freezes and captures discrete moments in time and space. My central argument is that photography’s assumed stillness is always constituted by a number of potential and actual mobilities that continually suture and re-suture viewing subjects and images into one another.Developing Benjamin’s idea of a the past and present coming together “in a flash”, Roland Barthes provides the second starting point with his notion of the punctum of photography: “this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me” (25). Conventional understandings of the punctum frame it as a static moment – so powerful that it freezes the viewer, stops them in their tracks, and captures their attention. My point is that the affective punch of the photograph is not a frozen moment at all; rather, the punctum – like the dialectic image – is fizzing with political electricity. Therefore, to suggest that a viewing subject is arrested in the moment of perception – that they are somehow captured by a photograph’s meaning – is to mistakenly understand the act of looking as a static behaviour.I want to use Dorsey’s image of the POW to push these theoretical starting points and explore the mobile dispositions that are generated when a viewing subject encounters a photograph. What most interests me about Dorsey’s photograph is the level of animation it produces. The POW’s return gaze is actually rather blank: it is unclear whether he is angry, weary, bored, insane or none of the above. But it is the viewing subject’s anxiety at such ambivalence – such unknowability – that provokes a powerful desire to name it. The visceral sensations and emotional responses provoked in viewers (are we taken aback? Do we sympathize with the POW? Are we equally blank?) very quickly become settled interpretations, for example, “his defiant gaze resists American power.” What I want to do is explore the pre-interpretive moment when images like Dorsey’s reach out and grab us – for it is in that moment that photography’s “political electricity” reveals itself most clearly.Production, Signification, InterpretationThe mobility inherent in the photograph has an important antecedent at the level of production. Since the Brownie camera was introduced in WWI, photographers have carried their mode of representation with them – in Dorsey’s case, his portable camera was carried with him as he travelled with the Marines through the Pacific (Philips 29). It is the photographer’s itinerary – his or her movement prior to clicking the camera’s shutter – that shapes and determines a photograph’s content. More to the point, the action of clicking the camera’s shutter is never an isolated moment; rather, it is punctured by all of the previous clicks and moments leading up to it – especially on a long photographic assignment like Dorsey’s – and contains within it all of the subsequent clicks and moments that potentially come after it. In this sense, the photographer’s click recalls Benjamin: it is a “charged force field of past and present” (Buck-Morss 219). That complicated temporality is also manifested in the photographer’s contact sheet (or, more recently, computer file) which operates as a visual travelogue of discrete moments that bleed into one another.The mobility inherent in photography extends itself into the level of signification; that is, the arrangements of signs depicted within the frame of each discrete image. Critic Gilberto Perez gives us a clue to this mobility in his comments about Eugène Atget’s famous ‘painterly’ photographs of Paris:A photograph begins with the mobility, or at least potential mobility, of the world’s materials, of the things reproduced from reality, and turns that into a still image. More readily than in a painting, we see things in a photograph, even statues, as being on the point of movement, for these things belong to the world of flux from which the image has been extracted (328).I agree that the origin point of a photograph is potential mobility, but that mobility is never completely vanquished when it is turned into a still image. For me, photographs – no matter what they depict – are always saturated with the “potential mobility of the world’s materials”, and in this sense they are never still. Indeed, the world of flux out of which the image is extracted includes the image itself, and in that sense, an image can never be isolated from the world it is derived from. If we follow Perez and characterize the world as one of flux, but then insist that the photograph can never be extracted from that world, it follows that the photograph, too, is characterized by fluctuation and change – in short, by mobility. The point, here, is to read a photograph counter intuitively – not as an arrest of movement or a freezing of time, but as a collection of signs that is always potentially mobile. This is what Roland Barthes was hinting at when he suggested that a photograph is “a mad image, chafed by reality”: any photograph is haunted by absence because the depicted object is no longer present, but it is also full of certainty that the depicted object did exist at a previous time and place (113-15). This is precisely Benjamin’s point as well, that “what has been comes together with the now” (N3.1; 463). Following on from Barthes and Benjamin, I want to argue that photographs don’t freeze a moment in time, but instead set in motion a continual journey between feelings of absence in the present (i.e. “it is not there”) and present imaginings of the past (i.e. “but it has indeed been”).As Barthes’ notion of the punctum reveals, the most powerful register at which photography’s inherent mobility operates is in the sensations, responses and feelings provoked in viewers. This is why we say that a photograph has the capacity to move us: the best images take us from one emotional state (e.g. passive, curious, bored) and carry us into another (e.g. shocked, sad, amused). It is this emotional terrain of our responses to photography that both Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have explored in depth. Why are we moved by some images and not others? Are documentary or artistic photographs more likely to reach out and prick us? What is the most appropriate or ethical response to pictures of another’s suffering?Sontag suggests a different connection between photography and mobility in that it enables a particular touristification of the world; that is, cameras help “convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted to an item for aesthetic appreciation” (On Photography 110). While Sontag’s political economy of photography (with its Frankfurt School echo) continues to be explored by anthropologists and scholars in Tourism Studies, I want to argue that it offers a particularly reductive account of photography’s potential mobilities. While Sontag does address photography’s constitutive and rather complex relationship with reality, she still conceives of photographs themselves as static and inert representations. Indeed, what she wrestled with in On Photography was the “insolent, poignant stasis of each photograph”, and the photograph’s capacity to make reality “stand still” (111-12; 163). The problem with such a view is that it limits our account of interpretation; in short, it suggests that viewers either accept a photograph’s static message (and are thus moved), or reject it (and remain unmoved). But the moving, here, is the sole prerogative of the viewer: there is no sense in which the photograph and its contents are themselves mobile. I want to argue that the relationships established in the act of looking between viewing subjects and the objects contained within an image are much more complex and varied than Sontag’s framework suggests. Photography’s Affective MobilityTo reveal the mobilities underscoring photography’s affective punch, we must redistribute its more familiar power relations through W.J.T. Mitchell’s important question: what do pictures want? Such a question subverts our usual approach to photographs (i.e. what do we want from photographs?) by redeploying the privileged agency of the viewer into the image itself. In other words, it is the image that demands something of the viewer rather than the other way around. What it demands, of course, is a response. Certainly this is an emotional response, for even being bored by a photograph is a response of sorts. But an emotional response is also an affective response, which means that the punch carried by a photograph is as physical as it is metaphorical or visual. Indeed, it is precisely in the act of perception, where the emotional and the affective fuse, that photography’s assumed stillness is powerfully subverted.If Mitchell animates the picture by affording it some of the viewer’s agency, then Gilles Deleuze goes one step further by exploring what happens to agency in the act of perception. For Deleuze, a work of art – for our purposes, a photograph – is not an inert or still document, but rather a “block of sensations” (Deleuze; Deleuze & Guattari; Bogue). It is not a finished object produced by an autonomous artist or beheld in its entirety by an autonomous viewer; rather, it is a combination of precepts (initial perceptions) and affects (physical intensities) that passes through all subjects at the point of visual perception. This kind of relational encounter with an image not only deconstructs Modernity’s foundational distinction between the subject and the object, it also opens up an affective connection between all subjects engaged in the act of looking; in this case, the photographer, the subjects and objects within the photograph and the viewer.From Deleuze, we know that perception is characterized by common physical responses in all subjects: the movement of the optic nerve, the dilation of the pupil, the squint of the eyelid, the craning of the neck to see up close. However small, however imperceptible, these physical sensations are all still movements; indeed, they are movements repeated by all seeing subjects. My point is that these imperceptible modes of attention are consistently engaged in the act of viewing photographs. What this suggests is that taking account of the affective level of perception changes our traditional understandings of interpretation; indeed, even if a photograph fails to move us emotionally, it certainly moves us physically, though we may not be conscious of it.Drawing from Mitchell and Deleuze, then, we can say that a photograph’s “insolent, poignant stasis” makes no sense. A photograph is constantly animated not just by the potentials inherent in its enframed subjects and objects, but more importantly, in the acts of perception undertaken by viewers. Certainly some photographs move us emotionally – to tears, to laughter, to rage – and indeed, this emotional terrain is where Barthes and Sontag offer important insights. My point is that all photographs, no matter what they depict, move us physically through the act of perception. If we take Mitchell’s question seriously and extend agency to the photograph, then it is in the affective register that we can discern a more relational encounter between subjects and objects because both are in a constant state of mobility.Ambivalence and ParalysisHow might Mitchell’s question apply to Dorsey’s photograph? What does this image want from us? What does it demand from our acts of looking? The dispersed account of agency put forward by Mitchell suggests that the act of looking can never be contained within the subject; indeed, what is produced in each act of looking is some kind of subject-object-world assemblage in which each component is characterised by its potential and actual mobilities. With respect to Dorsey’s image, then, the multiple lines of sight at work in the photograph indicate multiple – and mobile – relationalities. Primarily, there is the relationship between the viewer – any potential viewer – and the photograph. If we follow Mitchell’s line of questioning, however, we need to ask how the photograph itself shapes the emotive and affective experience of visual interpretation – how the photograph’s demand is transmitted to the viewer.Firstly, this demand is channelled through Dorsey’s line of sight that extends through his camera’s viewfinder and into the formal elements of the photograph: the focused POW in the foreground, the blurred figures in the background, the light and shade on the subjects’ clothing and skin, the battle scarred terrain, and the position of these elements within the viewfinder’s frame. As viewers we cannot see Dorsey, but his presence fills – and indeed constitutes – the photograph. Secondly, the photograph’s demand is channelled through the POW’s line of sight that extends to Dorsey (who is both photographer and marine Sergeant), and potentially through his camera to imagined viewers. It is precisely the return gaze of the POW that packs such an affective punch – not because of what it means, but rather because of how it makes us feel emotionally and physically. While a conventional account would understand this affective punch as shocking, stopping or capturing the viewer, I want to argue it does the opposite – it suddenly reveals the fizzing, vibrant mobilities that transmit the picture to us, and us to the picture.There are, I think, important lessons for us in Dorsey’s photograph. It is a powerful antecedent to Judith Butler’s exploration of the Abu Graib images, and her repetition of Sontag’s question of “whether the tortured can and do look back, and what do they see when they look at us” (966). The POW’s gaze provides an answer to the first part of this question – they certainly do look back. But as to what they see when they look back at us, that question can only be answered if we redistribute both agency and mobility into the photograph to empower and mobilize the tortured, the abject, and the objectified.That leaves us with Sontag’s much more vexing question of what we do after we look at photographs. As Butler explains, Sontag has denounced the photograph “precisely because it enrages without directing the rage, and so excites our moral sentiments at the same time that it confirms our political paralysis” (966). This sets up an important challenge for us: in refusing conventional understandings of photography as a still visual art, how can we use more dispersed accounts of agency and mobility to work through the political paralysis that Sontag identifies. AcknowledgementsPaul Dorsey’s photograph of the Japanese POW is # 80-G-475166 in the NAPU archive, and is reproduced here courtesy of the United States National Archives.ReferencesAdorno, Theodore. Prisms. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.Bachner, Evan. Men of WWII: Fighting Men at Ease. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2007.———. At Ease: Navy Men of WWII. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2004.Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000.Benjamin, Walter. “On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress.” In The Arcardes Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1999. 456-488.Bogue, Ronald. Deleuze on Music, Painting and the Arts. London: Routledge, 2003.Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge: MIT P, 1997.Butler, Judith. “Torture and the Ethics of Photography.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25.6 (2007): 951-66.Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Trans. Daniel W. Smith. London: Continuum, 2003.Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchill. New York: Columbia U P, 1994.Lisle, Debbie. “Benevolent Patriotism: Art, Dissent and The American Effect.” Security Dialogue 38.2 (2007): 233-50.Mitchell, William.J.T. What Do Pictures Want? The Lives and Loves of Images. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004.Perez, Gilberto. “Atget’s Stillness.” The Hudson Review 36.2 (1983): 328-37. Philips, Christopher. Steichen at War. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981.Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. London: Penguin, 2004.———. On Photography. London: Penguin, 1971Steichen, Edward. U.S. Navy War Photographs. New York: U.S. Camera, 1945.

Samurai and Chinese martial arts themes inspire and permeate the uniquely philosophical lyrics and beats of Wu-Tang Clan, a New York-based hip-hop collective made popular in the mid-nineties with their debut album Enter the Wu-Tang: Return of the 36 Chambers. Original founder RZA (“Rizza”) scored his first full-length motion-picture soundtrack and made his feature film debut with Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (Jim Jarmusch, 2000). Through a critical exploration of the film’s musical filter, it will be argued that RZA’s aesthetic vision effectively deterritorialises the figure of the samurai, according to which the samurai “change[s] in nature and connect[s] with other multiplicities” (Deleuze and Guattari, 9). The soundtrack consequently emancipates and redistributes the idea of the samurai from within the dynamic context of a fundamentally different aesthetic intensity, which the Wu-Tang has always hoped to communicate, that is to say, an aesthetics of adaptation or of what is called in hip-hop music more generally: an aesthetics of flow. At the center of Jarmusch’s film is a fundamental opposition between the sober asceticism and deeply coded lifestyle of Ghost Dog and the supple, revolutionary, itinerant hip-hop beats that flow behind it and beneath it, and which serve at once as philosophical foil and as alternate foundation to the film’s themes and message. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai tells the story of Ghost Dog (Forest Whitaker), a deadly and flawlessly precise contract killer for a small-time contemporary New York organised crime family. He lives his life in a late 20th-century urban America according to the strict tenets of the 18th century text Hagakure, which relates the principles of the Japanese Bushido (literally, the “way of the warrior,” but more often defined and translated as the “code of the samurai”). Others have noted the way in which Ghost Dog not only fails as an adaptation of the samurai genre but thematises this very failure insofar as the film depicts a samurai’s unsuccessful struggle to adapt in a corrupt and fractured postmodern, post-industrial reality (Lanzagorta, par. 4, 9; Otomo, 35-8). If there is any hope at all for these adaptations (Ghost Dog is himself an example), it lies, according to some, in the singular, outmoded integrity of his nostalgia, which despite the abstract jouissance or satisfaction it makes available, is nevertheless blank and empty (Otomo, 36-7). Interestingly, in his groundbreaking book Spectacular Vernaculars, and with specific reference to hip-hop, Russell Potter suggests that where a Eurocentric postmodernism posits a lack of meaning and collapse of value and authority, a black postmodernism that is neither singular nor nostalgic is prepared to emerge (6-9). And as I will argue there are more concrete adaptive strategies at work in the film, strategies that point well beyond the film to popular culture more generally. These are anti-nostalgic strategies of possibility and escape that have everything to do with the way in which hip-hop as soundtrack enables Ghost Dog in his becoming-samurai, a process by which a deterritorialised subject and musical flow fuse to produce a hybrid adaptation and identity. But hip-hip not only makes possible such a becoming, it also constitutes a potentially liberating adaptation of the past and of otherness that infuses the film with a very different but still concrete jouissance. At the root of Ghost Dog is a conflict between what Deleuze and Guattari call state and nomad authority, between the code that prohibits adaptation and its willful betrayer. The state apparatus, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is the quintessential form of interiority. The state nourishes itself through the appropriation, the bringing into its interior, of all that over which it exerts its control, and especially over those nomadic elements that constantly threaten to escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 380-7). In Ghost Dog, the code or state-form functions throughout the film as an omnipresent source of centralisation, authorisation and organisation. It is attested to in the intensely stratified urban environment in which Ghost Dog lives, a complicated and forbidding network of streets, tracks, rails, alleys, cemeteries, tenement blocks, freeways, and shipping yards, all of which serve to hem Ghost Dog in. And as race is highlighted in the film, it, too, must be included among the many ways in which characters are always already contained. What encounters with racism in the film suggest is the operative presence of a plurality of racial and cultural codes; the strict segregation of races and cultures in the film and the animosity which binds them in opposition reflect a racial stratification that mirrors the stratified topography of the cityscape. Most important, perhaps, is the way in which Bushido itself functions, at least in part, as code, as well as the way in which the form of the historical samurai in legend and reality circumscribes not only Ghost Dog’s existence but the very possibility of the samurai and the samurai film as such. On the one hand, Bushido attests to the absolute of religion, or as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: “a center that repels the obscure … essentially a horizon that encompasses” and which forms a “bond”, “pact”, or “alliance” between subject/culture and the all-encompassing embrace of its deity: in this case, the state-form which sanctions samurai existence (382-3). On the other hand, but in the same vein, the advent of Bushido, and in particular the Hagakure text to which Ghost Dog turns for meaning and guidance, coincides historically with the emergence of the modern Japanese state, or put another way, with the eclipse of the very culture it sponsors. In fact, samurai history as a whole can be viewed to some extent as a process of historical containment by which the state-form gradually encompassed those nomadic warring elements at the heart of early samurai existence. This is the socio-historical context of Bushido, insofar as it represents the codification of the samurai subject and the stratification of samurai culture under the pressures of modernisation and the spread of global capitalism. It is a social and historical context marked by the power of a bourgeoning military, political and economic organisation, and by policies of restraint, centralisation and sedentariness. Moreover, the local and contemporary manifestations of this social and historical context are revealed in many of the elements that permeate not only the traditional samurai films of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi or Kobayashi, but modern adaptations of the genre as well, which tend to convey a nostalgic mourning for this loss, or more precisely, for this failure to adapt. Thus the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog is dominated by the negative qualities of inaction, nonviolence and sobriety, and whether these are taken to express the sterility and impotence of postmodern existence or the emptiness of a nostalgia for an unbroken and heroic past, these qualities point squarely towards the transience of culture and towards the impossibility of adaptation and survival. Ghost Dog is a reluctant assassin, and the inherently violent nature of his task is always deflected. In the same way, most of Ghost Dog’s speech in the film is delivered through his soundless readings of the Hagakure, silent and austere moments that mirror as well the creeping, sterile atmosphere in which most of the film’s action takes place. It is an atmosphere of interiority that points not only towards the stratified environment which restricts possibility and expressivity but also squarely towards the meaning of Bushido as code. But this atmosphere meets resistance. For the samurai is above all a man of war, and, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, “the man of war [that is to say, the nomad] is always committing an offence against” the State (383). In Ghost Dog, for all the ways in which Ghost Dog’s experience is stratified by the Bushido as code and by the post-industrial urban reality in which he lives and moves, the film shows equally the extent to which these strata or codes are undermined by nomadic forces that trace “lines of flight” and escape (Deleuze and Guattari, 423). Clearly it is the film’s soundtrack, and thus, too, the aesthetic intensities of the flow in hip-hop music, which both constitute and facilitate this escape: We have an APB on an MC killer Looks like the work of a master … Merciless like a terrorist Hard to capture the flow Changes like a chameleon (“Da Mystery of Chessboxin,” Enter) Herein lies the significance of (and difference between) the meaning of Bushido as code and as way, a problem of adaptation and translation which clearly reflects the central conflict of the film. A way is always a way out, the very essence of escape, and it always facilitates the breaking away from a code. Deleuze and Guattari describe the nomad as problematic, hydraulic, inseparable from flow and heterogeneity; nomad elements, as those elements which the State is incapable of drawing into its interior, are said to remain exterior and excessive to it (361-2). It is thus significant that the interiority of Ghost Dog’s readings from the Hagakure and the ferocious exteriority of the soundtrack, which along with the Japanese text helps narrate the tale, reflect the same relationship that frames the state and nomad models. The Hagakure is not only read in silence by the protagonist throughout the film, but the Hagakure also figures prominently inside the diegetic world of the film as a visual element, whereas the soundtrack, whether it is functioning diegetically or non-diegetically, is by its very nature outside the narrative space of the film, effectively escaping it. For Deleuze and Guattari, musical expression is inseparable from a process of becoming, and, in fact, it is fair to say that the jouissance of the film is supplied wholly by the soundtrack insofar as it deterritorialises the conventional language of the genre, takes it outside of itself, and then reinvests it through updated musical flows that facilitate Ghost Dog’s becoming-samurai. In this way, too, the soundtrack expresses the violence and action that the plot carefully avoids and thus intimately relates the extreme interiority of the protagonist to an outside, a nomadic exterior that forecloses any possibility of nostalgia but which suggests rather a tactics of metamorphosis and immediacy, a sublime deterritorialisation that involves music becoming-world and world becoming-music. Throughout the film, the appearance of the nomad is accompanied, even announced, by the onset of a hip-hop musical flow, always cinematically represented by Ghost Dog’s traversing the city streets or by lengthy tracking shots of a passenger pigeon in flight, both of which, to take just two examples, testify to purely nomadic concepts: not only to the sheer smoothness of open sky-space and flight with its techno-spiritual connotations, but also to invisible, inherited pathways that cross the stratified heart of the city undetected and untraceable. Embodied as it is in the Ghost Dog soundtrack, and grounded in what I have chosen to call an aesthetics of flow, hip-hop is no arbitrary force in the film; it is rather both the adaptive medium through which Ghost Dog and the samurai genre are redeemed and the very expression of this adaptation. Deleuze and Guattari write: The necessity of not having control over language, of being a foreigner in one’s own tongue, in order to draw speech to oneself and ‘bring something incomprehensible into the world.’ Such is the form of exteriority … that forms a war machine. (378) Nowhere else do Deleuze and Guattari more clearly outline the affinities that bind their notion of the nomad and the form of exteriority that is essential to it with the politics of language, cultural difference and authenticity which so color theories of race and critical analyses of hip-hop music and culture. And thus the key to hip-hop’s adaptive power lies in its spontaneity and in its bringing into the world of something incomprehensible and unanticipated. If the code in Ghost Dog is depicted as nonviolent, striated, interior, singular, austere and measured, then the flow in hip-hop and in the music of the Wu-Tang that informs Ghost Dog’s soundtrack is violent, fluid, exterior, variable, plural, playful and incalculable. The flow in hip-hop, as well as in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, is grounded in a kinetic linguistic spontaneity, variation and multiplicity. Its lyrical flow is a cascade of accelerating rhymes, the very speed and implausibility of which often creates a sort of catharsis in performers and spectators: I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypotheses can’t define how I be droppin’ these mockeries, lyrically perform armed robberies Flee with the lottery, possibly they spotted me Battle-scarred shogun, explosion. … (“Triumph”, Forever) Over and against the paradigm of the samurai, which as I have shown is connected with relations of content and interiority, the flow is attested to even more explicitly in the Wu-Tang’s embrace of the martial arts, kung-fu and Chinese cinematic traditions. And any understanding of the figure of the samurai in the contemporary hip-hop imagination must contend with the relationship of this figure to both the kung-fu fighting traditions and to kung-fu cinema, despite the fact that they constitute very different cultural and historical forms. I would, of course, argue that it is precisely this playful adaptation or literal deterritorialisation of otherwise geographically and culturally distinct realities that comprises the adaptive potential of hip-hop. Kung-fu, like hip-hop, is predicated on the exteriority of style. It is also a form of action based on precision and immediacy, on the fluid movements of the body itself deterritorialised as weapon, and thus it reiterates that blend of violence, speed and fluidity that grounds the hip-hop aesthetic: “I’ll defeat your rhyme in just four lines / Yeh, I’ll wax you and tax you and plus save time” (RZA and Norris, 211). Kung-fu lends itself to improvisation and to adaptability, essential qualities of combat and of lyrical flows in hip-hop music. For example, just as in kung-fu combat a fighter’s success is fundamentally determined by his ability to intuit and adapt to the style and skill and detailed movements of his adversary, the victory of a hip-hop MC engaged in, say, a freestyle battle will be determined by his capacity for improvising and adapting his own lyrical flow to counter and overcome his opponent’s. David Bordwell not only draws critical lines of difference between the Hong Kong and Hollywood action film but also hints at the striking differences between the “delirious kinetic exhilaration” of Hong Kong cinema and the “sober, attenuated, and grotesque expressivity” of the traditional Japanese samurai film (91-2). Moreover, Bordwell emphasises what the Wu-Tang Clan has always known and demonstrated: the sympathetic bond between kung-fu action or hand-to-hand martial arts combat and the flow in hip-hop music. Bordwell calls his kung-fu aesthetic “expressive amplification”, which communicates with the viewer through both a visual and physical intelligibility and which is described by Bordwell in terms of beats, exaggerations, and the “exchange and rhyming of gestures” (87). What is pointed to here are precisely those aspects of Hong Kong cinema that share essential similarities with hip-hop music as such and which permeate the Wu-Tang aesthetic and thus, too, challenge or redistribute the codified stillness and negativity that define the filmic atmosphere of Ghost Dog. Bordwell argues that Hong Kong cinema constitutes an aesthetics in action that “pushes beyond Western norms of restraint and plausibility,” and in light of my thesis, I would argue that it pushes beyond these same conventions in traditional Japanese cinema as well (86). Bruce Lee, too, in describing the difference between Chinese kung-fu and Japanese fighting forms in A Warrior’s Journey (Bruce Little, 2000) points to the latter’s regulatory principles of hesitation and segmentarity and to the former’s formlessness and shapelessness, describing kung-fu when properly practiced as “like water, it can flow or it can crash,” qualities which echo not only Bordwell’s description of the pause-burst-pause pattern of kung-fu cinema’s combat sequences but also the Wu-Tang Clan’s own self-conception as described by GZA (“Jizza”), a close relative of RZA and co-founder of the Wu-Tang Clan, when he is asked to explain the inspiration for the title of his album Liquid Swords: Actually, ‘Liquid Swords’ comes from a kung-fu flick. … But the title was just … perfect. I was like, ‘Legend of a Liquid Sword.’ Damn, this is my rhymes. This is how I’m spittin’ it. We say the tongue is symbolic of the sword anyway, you know, and when in motion it produces wind. That’s how you hear ‘wu’. … That’s the wind swinging from the sword. The ‘Tang’, that’s when it hits an object. Tang! That’s how it is with words. (RZA and Norris, 67) Thus do two competing styles animate the aesthetic dynamics of the film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai: an aesthetic of codified arrest and restraint versus an aesthetic of nomadic resistance and escape. The former finds expression in the film in the form of the cultural and historical meanings of the samurai tradition, defined by negation and attenuated sobriety, and in the “blank parody” (Otomo, 35) of a postmodern nostalgia for an empty historical past exemplified in the appropriation of the Samurai theme and in the post-industrial prohibitions and stratifications of contemporary life and experience; the latter is attested to in the affirmative kinetic exhilaration of kung-fu style, immediacy and expressivity, and in the corresponding adaptive potential of a hip-hop musical flow, a distributive, productive, and anti-nostalgic becoming, the nomadic essence of which redeems the rhetoric of postmodern loss described by the film. References Bordwell, David. “Aesthetics in Action: Kungfu, Gunplay, and Cinematic Expressivity.” At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World. Ed. and Trans. Esther Yau. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 2004. Bruce Lee: A Warrior’s Journey. Dir./Filmmaker John Little. Netflix DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000. Daidjo, Yuzan. Code of the Samurai. Trans. Thomas Cleary. Tuttle Martial Arts. Boston: Tuttle, 1999. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP,1987. Forman, Murray, and Mark Anthony Neal, eds. That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Dir. Jim Jarmusch. Netflix DVD. Artisan, 2000. Hurst, G. Cameron III. Armed Martial Arts of Japan. New Haven: Yale UP,1998. Ikegami, Eiko. The Taming of the Samurai. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995. Jansen, Marius, ed. Warrior Rule in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Kurosawa, Akira. Seven Samurai and Other Screenplays. Trans. Donald Richie. London: Faber and Faber, 1992. Lanzagorta, Marco. “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai.” Senses of Cinema. Sept-Oct 2002. http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/cteq/02/22/ghost_dog.htm>. Mol, Serge. Classical Fighting Arts of Japan. Tokyo/New York: Kodansha Int., 2001. Otomo, Ryoko. “‘The Way of the Samurai’: Ghost Dog, Mishima, and Modernity’s Other.” Japanese Studies 21.1 (May 2001) 31-43. Potter, Russell. Spectacular Vernaculars. Albany: SUNY P, 1995. RZA, The, and Chris Norris. The Wu-Tang Manual. New York: Penguin, 2005. Silver, Alain. The Samurai Film. Woodstock, New York: Overlook, 1983. Smith, Christopher Holmes. “Method in the Madness: Exploring the Boundaries of Identity in Hip-Hop Performativity.” Social Identities 3.3 (Oct 1997): 345-75. Watkins, Craig S. Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. Wu-Tang Clan. Enter the Wu-Tang: 36 Chambers. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1993. ———. Wu-Tang Forever. CD. RCA/Loud Records, 1997. Xing, Yan, ed. Shaolin Kungfu. Trans. Zhang Zongzhi and Zhu Chengyao. Beijing: China Pictorial, 1996. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Eubanks, Kevin P. "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>. APA Style Eubanks, K. (May 2007) "Becoming-Samurai: Samurai (Films), Kung-Fu (Flicks) and Hip-Hop (Soundtracks)," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/11-eubanks.php>.

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Through my last lengthy writing project, it did not take long to I realise I had become obsessed with paths. The proof of it was there in my notebooks, and, most prominently, in the backlog of photographs cluttering the inner workings of my mobile phone. Most of the photographs I took had a couple of things in common: first, the astonishing greenness of the world they were describing; second, the way a road or path or corridor or pavement or trail led off into distance. The greenness was because I was in England, in summer, and mostly in a part of the country where green seems at times the only colour. I am not sure what it was about tailing perspective that caught me.Image 1: a) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradford; b) Undercliffe Cemetery, Bradfordc) Leeds Road, Otley; d) Shibden Park, Halifax Image 2: a) Runswick Bay; b) St. Mary's Churchyard, Habberleyc) The Habberley Road, to Pontesbury; d) Todmorden, path to Stoodley Pike I was working on a kind of family memoir, tied up in my grandmother’s last days, which were also days I spent marching through towns and countryside I once knew, looking for clues about a place and its past. I had left the north-west of England a decade or so before, and I was grappling with what James Wood calls “homelooseness”, a sensation of exile that even economic migrants like myself encounter. It is a particular kind of “secular homelessness” in which “the ties that might bind one to Home have been loosened” (105-106). Loosened irrevocably, I might add. The kind of wandering which I embarked on is not unique. Wood describes it in himself, and in the work of W.G. Sebald—a writer who, he says, “had an exquisite sense of the varieties of not-belonging” (106).I walked a lot, mostly on paths I used to know. And when, later, I counted up the photographs I had taken of that similar-but-different scene, there were almost 500 of them, none of which I can bring myself to delete. Some were repeated, or nearly so—I had often tried to make sure the path in the frame was centred in the middle of the screen. Most of the pictures were almost entirely miscellaneous, and if it were not for a feature on my phone I could not work out how to turn off (that feature which tracks where each photograph was taken) I would not have much idea of what each picture represented. What’s clear is that there was some lingering significance, some almost-tangible metaphor, in the way I was recording the walking I was doing. This same significance is there, too (in an almost quantifiable way), in the thesis I was working on while I was taking the photographs: I used the word “path” 63 times in the version I handed to examiners, not counting all the times I could have, but chose not to—all the “pavements”, “trails”, “roads”, and “holloways” of it would add up to a number even more substantial. For instance, the word “walk”, or derivatives of it, comes up 115 times. This article is designed to ask why. I aim to focus on that metaphor, on that significance, and unpack the way life writing can intersect with both the journey of a life being lived, and the process of writing down that life (by process of writing I sometimes mean anything but: I mean the process of working towards the writing. Of going, of doing, of talking, of spending, of working, of thinking, of walking). I came, in the thesis, to view certain kinds of prose as a way of imitating the rhythms of the mind, but I think there’s something about that rhythm which associates it with the feet as well. Rebecca Solnit thinks so too, or, at least, that the processes of thinking and walking can wrap around each other, helixed or concatenated. In Wanderlust she says that:the rhythm of walking generates a kind of rhythm of thinking, and the passage through a landscape echoes or stimulates the passage through a series of thoughts. This creates an odd consonance between internal and external passage, one that suggests that the mind is also a landscape of sorts and that walking is one way to traverse it. (5-6)The “odd consonance” Solnit speaks of is a kind of seamlessness between the internal and external; it is something which can be aped on the page. And, in this way, prose can imitate the mind thinking. This way of writing is evident in the digression-filled, wandering, sinuous sentences of W.G. Sebald, and of Marcel Proust as well. I don’t want to entangle myself in the question of whether Proust and Sebald count as life writers here. I used them as models, and, at the very least, I think their prose manipulates the conceits of the autobiographical pact. In fact, Sebald often refused to label his own work; once he called his writing “prose [...] of indefinite form” (Franklin 123). My definition of life writing is, thus, indefinite, and merely indicates the field in which I work and know best.Edmund White, when writing on Proust, suggested that every page of Remembrance of Things Past—while only occasionally being a literal page of Proust’s mind thinking—is, nevertheless, “a transcript of a mind thinking [...] the fully orchestrated, ceaseless, and disciplined ruminations of one mind, one voice” (138). Ceaselessness, seamlessness ... there’s also a viscosity to this kind of prose—Virginia Woolf called it “impassioned”, and spoke of the way some prosecan lick up with its long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact and mass them into the most subtle labyrinths, and listen silently at doors behind which only a murmur, only a whisper, is to be heard. With all the suppleness of a tool which is in constant use it can follow the windings and record the changes which are typical of the modern mind. To this, with Proust and Dostoevsky behind us, we must agree. (20)When I read White and Woolf it seemed they could have been talking about Sebald, too: everything in Sebald’s oeuvre is funnelled through what White described in Remembrance as the cyclopean “I” at the centre of the Proustian consciousness (138). The same could be said about Sebald: as Lynne Schwartz says, “All Sebald’s characters sound like the narrator” (15). And that narrator has very particular qualities, encouraged by the sense of homelooseness Wood describes: the Sebald narrator is a wanderer, by train through Italian cities and New York Suburbs, on foot through the empty reaches of the English countryside, exploring the history of each settlement he passes through [...] Wherever he travels, he finds strangely vacant streets and roads, not a soul around [...] Sebald’s books are famously strewn with evocative, gloomy black-and-white photographs that call up the presence of the dead, of vanished places, and also serve as proofs of his passage. (Schwartz 14) I tried to resist the urge to take photographs, for the simple reason that I knew I could not include them all in the finished thesis—even including some would seem (perhaps) derivative. But this method of wandering—whether on the page or in the world—was formative for me. And the linkage between thinking and walking, and walking and writing, and writing and thinking is worth exploring, if only to identify some reason for that need to show proof of passage.Walking in Proust and Sebald either forms the shape of narrative, or one its cruxes. Both found ways to let walking affect the rhythm, movement, motivation, and even the aesthetic of their prose. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, for example, is plotless because of the way it follows its narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk. The effect is similar to something Murray Baumgarten noticed in one of Sebald’s other books, The Emigrants: “The [Sebaldian] narrator discovers in the course of his travels (and with him the reader) that he is constructing the text he is reading, a text at once being imagined and destroyed, a fragment of the past, and a ruin that haunts the present” (268). Proust’s opus is a meditation on the different ways we can walk. Remembrance is a book about momentum—a book about movement. It is a book which always forges forward, but which always faces backward, where time and place can still and footsteps be paused in motion, or tiptoed upstairs and across tables or be caught in flight over the body of an octogenarian lying on a beach. And it is the walks of the narrator’s past—his encounters with landscape—that give his present (and future) thoughts impetus: the rhythms of his long-past progress still affect the way he moves and acts and thinks, and will always do so:the “Méséglise way” and the “Guermantes way” remain for me linked with many of the little incidents of that one of all the divers lives along whose parallel lines we are moved, which is the most abundant in sudden reverses of fortune, the richest in episodes; I mean the life of the mind [...] [T]he two “ways” give to those [impressions of the mind] a foundation, depth, a dimension lacking from the rest. They invest them, too, with a charm, a significance which is for me alone. (Swann’s Way 252-255)The two “ways”—walks in and around the town of Combray—are, for the narrator, frames through which he thinks about his childhood, and all the things which happened to him because of that childhood. I felt something similar through the process of writing my thesis: a need to allow the 3-mile-per-hour-connection between mind and body and place that Solnit speaks about seep into my work. I felt the stirrings of old ways; the places I once walked, which I photographed and paced, pulsed and pushed me forwards in the present and towards the future. I felt strangely attached to, and disconnected from, those pathways: lanes where I had rummaged for conkers; streets my grandparents had once lived and worked on; railways demolished because of roads which now existed, leaving only long, straight pathways through overgrown countryside suffused with time and memory. The oddness I felt might be an effect of what Wood describes as a “certain doubleness”, “where homesickness is a kind of longing for Britain and an irritation with Britain: sickness for and sickness of” (93-94). The model of seamless prose offered some way to articulate, at least, the particularities of this condition, and of the problem of connection—whether with place or the past. But it is in this shift away from conclusiveness, which occurs when the writer constructs-as-they-write, that Baumgarten sees seamlessness:rather than the defined edges, boundaries, and conventional perceptions promised by realism, and the efficient account of intention, action, causation, and conclusion implied by the stance of realistic prose, reader and narrator have to assimilate the past and present in a dream state in which they blend imperceptibly into each other. (277)It’s difficult to articulate the way in which the connection between walking, writing, and thinking works. Solnit draws one comparison, talking to the ways in which digression and association mix:as a literary structure, the recounted walk encourages digression and association, in contrast to the stricter form of a discourse or the chronological progression of a biographical or historical narrative [...] James Joyce and Virginia Woolf would, in trying to describe the workings of the mind, develop of style called stream of consciousness. In their novels Ulysses and Mrs Dalloway, the jumble of thoughts and recollections of their protagonists unfolds best during walks. This kind of unstructured, associative thinking is the kind most often connected to walking, and it suggests walking as not an analytical but an improvisational act. (21)I think the key, here, is the notion of association—in the making of connections, and, in my case, in the making of connections between present and past. When we walk we exist in a roving state, and with a dual purpose: Sophie Cunningham says that we walk to get from one place to the next, but also to insist that “what lies between our point of departure and our destination is important. We create connection. We pay attention to detail, and these details plant us firmly in the day, in the present” (Cunningham). The slipperiness of homelooseness can be emphasised in the slipperiness of seamless prose, and walking—situating self in the present—is a rebuttal of slipperiness (if, as I will argue, a rebuttal which has at its heart a contradiction: it is both effective and ineffective. It feels as close as is possible to something impossible to attain). Solnit argues that walking and what she calls “personal, descriptive, and specific” writing are suited to each other:walking is itself a way of grounding one’s thoughts in a personal and embodied experience of the world that it lends itself to this kind of writing. This is why the meaning of walking is mostly discussed elsewhere than in philosophy: in poetry, novels, letters, diaries, travellers’ accounts, and first-person essays. (26)If a person is searching for some kind of possible-impossible grounding in the past, then walking pace is the pace at which to achieve that sensation (both in the world and on the page). It is at walking pace that connections can be made, even if they can be sensed slipping away: this is the Janus-faced problem of attempting to uncover anything which has been. The search, in fact, becomes facsimile for the past itself, or for the inconclusiveness of the past. In my own work—in preparing for that work—I walked and wrote about walking up the flank of the hill which hovered above the house in which I lived before I left England. To get to the top, and the great stone monument which sits there, I had to pass that house. The door was open, and that was enough to unsettle. Baumgarten, again on The Emigrants, articulates the effect: “unresolved, fragmented, incomplete, relying on shards for evidence, the narrator insists on the inconclusiveness of his experience: rather than arriving at a conclusion, narrator and reader are left disturbed” (269).Sebald writes in his usual intense way about a Swiss writer, Robert Walser, who he calls le promeneur solitaire (“The Solitary Walker”). Walser was a prolific writer, but through the last years of his life wrote less and less until he ended up incapable of doing so: in the end, Sebald says, “the traces Robert Walser left on his path through life were so faint as to have almost been effaced altogether” (119).Sebald draws parallels between Walser and his own grandfather. Both have worked their way into Sebald’s prose, along with the author himself. Because of this cocktail, I’ve come to read Sebald’s thoughts on Walser as sideways thoughts on his own prose (perhaps due to that cyclopean quality described by White). The works of the two writers share, at the very least, a certain incandescent ephemerality—a quality which exists in Sebald’s work, crystallised in the form and formlessness of a wasps’ nest. The wasps’ nest is a symbol Sebald uses in his book Vertigo, and which he talks to in an interview with Sarah Kafatou:do you know what a wasp’s nest is like? It’s made of something much much thinner than airmail paper: grey and as thin as possible. This gets wrapped around and around like pastry, like a millefeuille, and can get as big as two feet across. It weighs nothing. For me the wasp’s nest is a kind of ideal vision: an object that is extremely complicated and intricate, made out of something that hardly exists. (32)It is in this ephemerality that the walker’s way of moving—if not their journey—can be felt. The ephemerality is necessary because of the way the world is: the way it always passes. A work which is made to seem to encompass everything, like Remembrance of Things Past, is made to do so because that is the nature of what walking offers: an ability to comprehend the world solidly, both minutely and vastly, but with a kind of forgetting attached to it. When a person walks through the world they are firmly embedded in it, yes, but they are also always enacting a process of forgetting where they have been. This continual interplay between presence and absence is evidenced in the way in which Sebald and Proust build the consciousnesses they shape on the page—consciousnessess accustomed to connectedness. According to Sebald, it was through the prose of Walser that he learned this—or, at least, through an engagement with Walser’s world, Sebald, “slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time” (149). Perhaps it can be seen in the way that the Méséglise and Guermantes ways resonate for the Proustian narrator even when they are gone. Proust’s narrator receives a letter from an old love, in the last volume of Remembrance, which describes the fate of the Méséglise way (Swann’s way, that is—the title of the first volume in the sequence). Gilberte tells him that the battlefields of World War I have overtaken the paths they used to walk:the little road you so loved, the one we called the stiff Hawthorn climb, where you professed to be in love with me when you were a child, when all the time I was in love with you, I cannot tell you how important that position is. The great wheatfield in which it ended is the famous “slope 307,” the name you have so often seen recorded in the communiqués. The French blew up the little bridge over the Vivonne which, you remember, did not bring back your childhood to you as much as you would have liked. The Germans threw others across; during a year and a half they held one half of Combray and the French the other. (Time Regained 69-70)Lia Purpura describes, and senses, a similar kind of connectedness. The way in which each moment builds into something—into the ephemeral, shifting self of a person walking through the world—is emphasised because that is the way the world works:I could walk for miles right now, fielding all that passes through, rubs off, lends a sense of being—that rush of moments, objects, sensations so much like a cloud of gnats, a cold patch in the ocean, dust motes in a ray of sun that roil, gather, settle around my head and make up the daily weather of a self. (x)This is what seamless prose can emulate: the rush of moments and the folds and shapes which dust turns and makes. And, well, I am aware that this may seem a grand kind of conclusion, and even a peculiarly nonspecific one. But nonspecificity is built by a culmination of details, of sentences—it is built deliberately, to evoke a sense of looseness in the world. And in the associations which result, through the mind of the writer, their narrator, and the reader, much more than is evident on the page—Sebald’s “everything”—is flung to the surface. Of course, this “everything” is split through with the melancholy evident in the destruction of the Méséglise way. Nonspecificity becomes the result of any attempt to capture the past—or, at least, the past becomes less tangible the longer, closer, and slower your attempt to grasp it. In both Sebald and Proust the task of representation is made to feel seamless in echo of the impossibility of resolution.In the unbroken track of a sentence lies a metaphor for the way in which life is spent: under threat, forever assaulted by the world and the senses, and forever separated from what came before. The walk-as-method is entangled with the mind thinking and the pen writing; each apes the other, and all work towards the same kind of end: an articulation of how the world is. At least, in the hands of Sebald and Proust and through their long and complex prosodies, it does. For both there is a kind of melancholy attached to this articulation—perhaps because the threads that bind sever as well. The Rings of Saturn offers a look at this. The book closes with a chapter on the weaving of silk, inflected, perhaps, with a knowledge of the ways in which Robert Walser—through attempts to ensnare some of life’s ephemerality—became a victim of it:That weavers in particular, together with scholars and writers with whom they had much in common, tended to suffer from melancholy and all the evils associated with it, is understandable given the nature of their work, which forced them to sit bent over, day after day, straining to keep their eye on the complex patterns they created. It is difficult to imagine the depths of despair into which those can be driven who, even after the end of the working day, are engrossed in their intricate designs and who are pursued, into their dreams, by the feeling that they have got hold of the wrong thread. (283)Vladimir Nabokov, writing on Swann’s Way, gives a competing metaphor for thinking through the seamlessness afforded by walking and writing. It is, altogether, more optimistic: more in keeping with Purpura’s interpretation of connectedness: “Proust’s conversations and his descriptions merge into one another, creating a new unity where flower and leaf and insect belong to one and the same blossoming tree” (214). This is the purpose of long and complex books like The Rings of Saturn and Remembrance of Things Past: to draw the lines which link each and all together. To describe the shape of consciousness, to mimic the actions of a body experiencing its progress through the world. I think that is what the photographs I took when wandering attempt, in a failing way, to do. They all show a kind of relentlessness, but in that relentlessness is also, I think, the promise of connectedness—even if not connectedness itself. Each path aims forward, and articulates something of what came before and what might come next, whether trodden in the world or walked on the page.Author’s NoteI’d like to express my thanks to the anonymous reviewers who took time to improve this article. I’m grateful for their insights and engagement, and for the nuance they added to the final copy.References Baumgarten, Murray. “‘Not Knowing What I Should Think:’ The Landscape of Postmemory in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 5.2 (2007): 267-287. 28 Sep. 2018 <https://doi.org/10.1353/pan.2007.0000>.Cunningham, Sophie. “Staying with the Trouble.” Australian Book Review 371 (May 2015). 23 June 2016 <https://www.australianbookreview.com.au/abr-online/archive/2015/2500-2015-calibre-prize-winner-staying-with-the-trouble>.Franklin, Ruth. “Rings of Smoke.” The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. Ed. Lynne Sharon Schwartz. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007. 121-122.Kafatou, Sarah. “An Interview with W.G. Sebald.” Harvard Review 15 (1998): 31-35. Nabokov, Vladimir. “Marcel Proust: The Walk by Swann’s Place.” 1980. Lectures on Literature. London: Picador, 1983. 207-250.Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Part I. 1913. Trans. C.K. Scott Moncrieff in 1922. London: Chatto & Windus, 1960.———. Time Regained. 1927. Trans. Stephen Hudson. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.Purpura, Lia. “On Not Pivoting”. Diagram 12.1 (n.d.). 21 June 2018 <http://thediagram.com/12_1/purpura.html>.Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, ed. The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G. Sebald. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007.Sebald, W.G. The Rings of Saturn. 1995. Trans. Michael Hulse in 1998. London: Vintage, 2002.——. “Le Promeneur Solitaire.” A Place in the Country. Trans. Jo Catling. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013. 117-154.Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. 2001. London: Granta Publications, 2014.White, Edmund. Proust. London: Phoenix, 1999.Wood, James. The Nearest Thing to Life. London: Jonathan Cape, 2015.Woolf, Virginia. “The Narrow Bridge of Art.” Granite and Rainbow. USA: Harvest Books, 1975.