Digital Cinema: PhotoBooth: Digital Effects and Digital Affects?
Author: James Addicott (© 2009 James Addicott)
Contact: james@spatialmontage.com

Introduction:

Fredric Jameson (1991) hypothesised that a: "waning of affect" was a central part of postmodernity (pp. 69/71). Such a lessening of affect he argued is a hereditary within the standardising logic of late capitalism, mass consumption and commoditisation. The depth of the subject is decentred by a focus on surface imagery - a superficial layer of symbolic representation. Conversely, when writing about the Omaha Beach scene in Saving Private Ryan, Julie Turnock claims that the merging of analogue and digital effects produce a hybrid cinematic effect. This would cause a "visceral effect" within the viewer. The production of such a direct cinematic affect Turnock describes as a: "deliberate "assault" on the body of the observer". Jameson claims the world of the post-modern art and architecture "decenters" the formerly centred subject, whereas Turnock claims the "cinesthetic subject" (p. 265) is engaged by the medium through a breakdown between the on and off screen space. This dichotomy represents two opposed discourses about the effect/affect relationship in contemporary media culture. The former claims that affect cannot be effectively be transposed through postmodern media; the latter notion implies that new media is highly efficient in stimulating affect. How affective then, are digital effects? Could such a thing as a "digital affect" be conceivable? Is new media marking the end of the post-modern era and the beginning of Manovich's "Info-aesthetics"? What implications would the internalisation of digital effects have in contemporary cultural terms? I will conduct a practical based research project that will address the issue of effect/affect in digital media. My central question will be; are new media effects causing a levelling down or intensification of spectator affect? This will allow me to present my thesis that new media technology can allow designers the power to encode spectator affects - worryingly - to a nearer degree of perfection.

Research:

My research will focus on the Apple MAC's "Photo Booth" application. This package allows users to view and photograph themselves with a variety of real-time digital filters. It offers a digital remediation of the analogue "Hall of Mirrors". It also includes a range of effects that are unique to digital technology. In particular a "Pop Art" effect that toys with Warhol's post-modern stylisation. The viewers image is displayed in a real-time "Spatial Montage" upon the space of the screen. My original proposal was intent on organising a focus group, to observe how digital effects affected the spectator. However, when reviewing the backlog of images that I have accumulated in my laptop, I realised that my ethnographic research had already been conducted. My Photo Booth library was filled with images of facial expressions of friends and students who had been using my laptop. Could this 'raw data' be used as cultural evidence? This idea would suggest that the affect of digital media effects be measured through a combination of physiognomy and semiology. Such a notion would suggest that a software code could be decoded as semiotically through facial expression. Are we viewing the internalisation of Manovich's code of "Info-aesthetics"? This would also suggest that cybernetic technology has the ability to encode our emotional affects, bodily responses, and facial expressions. Bernadette Wegenstein (2008) is interested in such a language, a: "pure language" - with universal rules, that can read and interpret authoritatively the connection between the inside of a person, his or her "character," or "soul," to his or her outer appearance" (abbreviation, para 1). My thesis suggests that the emotional inner sphere can be activated, or triggered, by digitally generated effects - worryingly - to an astonishingly accurate degree.

PhotoBooth
Please click here to read the projects research and theoretical discussion>
Grace Jones "Corporate Canibal" In Steven Shaviro (2008) analysis of the Grace Jones' "Corporate Cannibal" video (fig ref 1), he argues that the style: "gives the most profound expression or articulation that I have yet come across to the affect of the vertiginous "globalized network society" (abbreviation, para 12). Jones video has been created using the same effects that Photo Booth produces on a standardized and domestic level. Much like Jameson who related post-modernity in Marxist terms to late-capitalism, Shaviro relates Jones': "electronic mutations or modulations" to the: "metamorphoses of Capital itself" (abbreviation, para 12). He concludes that the same digital technologies, which conduct the flow of Capital, are being used to produce morphing effects and educe spectator affect. It would seem that twinfold, capital and the technologies that mediate social interaction, are cultural determents. With a Marxist base-structural undertone, such a claim would re-enforce Marshal McLuhan's infamous claim that: "societies have always been shaped by the nature of the media by which men communicate" (2001, p. 8). The form of contemporary media is becoming increasingly wireless. Therefore, we can only consider that new media is engulfing us rather than de-centrering us,
(fig ref 1) Grace Jones "Corporate Cannibal"

Conclusion.

If we are to consider these digital effects from a Marxist perspective then following the logic of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer's "Culture industry". Their central argument is that: "Culture has always played its part in taming revolutionary and barbaric intensions" (p. 152). The political pacification of the mass-audience is key to the continuation and reproduction of the system of capitalism. It would follow that digital effect - although standardised - should remain highly affective. This notion should then be applied to cyber-culture in late-capitalism. The centering of the subjects body, which is enabled through digital and wireless technology, ensures that: "Real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies" (p. 126). Photo Booths effects and Grace Jones' Corporate Cannibal are in many ways visually indistinguishable. Much like Shaviro's analysis of Corporate Cannibal suggests, we use the tools of new media to engulf ourselves into the same wireless system that transports capital and generates our symbolic representations. It is also the imperitive of cybernetic technologies to operate in response to human interaction. Photo Booth allows the partial-observer to realise this relationship - as I have done myself.

Cybernetic technologies demand that the subject is central to a feedback loop system rather than positioning them in a displaced location. It is neither the aim of cybernetics to detach the human from the mechanism, but include them within the operation. What we see in the Photo Booth reflection is our cybernetic reflection. What I have observed in my ethnographic study has been the feedback control system of cybernetics. Therefore, the "Cyber-Culture Industry", becomes the continuation of the Althusarian notion of re-production in the form of a technological feedback loop. Therefore, Jameson's argument fails to consider that the subject could be engaged in such a mechanism. His focus was fixated upon the demands of capitalism, rather than the technologies used to mediate capital. Furthermore, by separating the real, the imaginary and the symbolic order - as three separate areas of psychoanalytical cultural assessment, Jameson overlooks the cybernetic capacity to integrate these domains into one complete sphere of 'reality'. As cybernetics further fragments Jameson's argument, and now engulfs us wirelessly, non-passive actions revolve around our ability to detach ourselves from these reflections.

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