This page contains materials intended
to facilitate class discussion (excerpts from readings,
outlines of issues, links to resources, etc.). The
materials are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page is subject
to revision as the instructor finalizes preparation.
(Last revised
1/28/02
)
Russian-born computer programmer and artist,
worked in Manhattan firm Digital Effects
(3-D computer animation for film and TV),
became critic/theorist/artist on the "new
media" and "net art" scene
(e.g., Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH,
Nettime-L)
Manovich on Remediation (cf.,
other theorists on "remediation)
"The new avant-garde is no longer concerned
with seeing or representing the world in new
ways but rather with accessing and using in
new ways previously accumulated media. In
this respect new media is post-media or meta-media,
as it uses old media as its primary material."
("Avant-garde
as Software," 1999 [Word doc])
Biographical circumstances of poem: 1793
1798
("Five years have past; five summers,
with the length / Of five long winters!")
The biographical, social, philosophical
problem of discontinuity in Wordsworth's
poetry
The solution to the problem of discontinuous
identity is memory:
Memory is a "picture of the mind":
And
now, with gleams of half-extinguished
thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with
the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing
thoughts
That in this moment there is life
and food
For future years. (ll.
58-65)
Memory composites or layers together the
discontinuous moments of time in a single,
fused continuity (in Photoshop-speak, it
"flattens" the "layers"):
And
so I dare to hope,
Though
changed, no doubt, from what I was
when first
I came among these hills; when like
a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by
the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely
streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a
man
Flying from something that he dreads,
than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For
nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish
days,
And their glad animal movements
all gone by)
To me was all in all.--I cannot
paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall
rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy
wood,
Their colours and their forms, were
then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.--That time
is past,
And all its aching joys are now
no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not
for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other
gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I
would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have
learned
To look on nature, not as in the
hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing
oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of
ample power
To chasten and subdue. And
I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with
the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns,
And the round ocean and the living
air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind
of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects
of all thought,
And rolls through all things.
(ll.
65-102)
Memory is "natural" and "organic"
(the "One Life")
William Gibson: Agrippa
(A Book of the Dead)
A poem about identity (who "I"
am)
The problem of identity is discontinuity:
The 4 discontinuous biographical scenes
of the poem:
Gibson's father's childhood
Gibson's own childhood in Virginia
(his father died when he was six)
Gibson's young manhood in Virginia
Gibson's move to Canada to escape
the draft
The solution to the problem of identity is
memory:
Memory is not a "picture of the mind"
but a photo album
I hesitated
before untying the bow
that bound this book together.
A black book:
ALBUMS
CA. AGRIPPA
Order
Extra Leaves
By
Letter and Name
A Kodak album of time-burned
black construction paper
(ll.
1-10)
Memory, in other words, is media,
and specifically media understood from the
perspective of digital new media
Memory composites or layers the discontinuous
moments of time—e.g., photos in sections
I and III of the poem:
A flat-roofed
shack
Against a mountain ridge
In the foreground are tumbled boards
and offcuts
He must have smelled the pitch, In
August
The sweet hot reek
Of the electric saw
Biting into decades
Next the spaniel Moko
"Moko 1919"
Poses on small bench or table
Before a backyard tree
His coat is lustrous
The grass needs cutting
Beyond the tree,
In eerie Kodak clarity,
Are the summer backstairs of Wheeling,
West
Virginia
Someone's left a wooden stepladder
out
(ll.
27-44)
But the layers of memory do not
flatten or fuse in an "organic,"
"natural" way. The inspiration
of the work is not Nature but "The
Mechanism":
The Camera:
The mechanism:
stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits
of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.
(ll.
98-104)
The Gun:
Now in high-ceiling bedrooms,
unoccupied, unvisited,
in the bottom drawers of veneered
bureaus
in cool chemical darkness curl commemorative
montages of the country's World
War dead,
just as I myself discovered
one other summer in an attic trunk,
and beneath that every boy's best
treasure
of tarnished actual ammunition
real little bits of war
but also
the mechanism
itself.
The blued finish of firearms
is a process, controlled, derived
from common
rust, but
there
under so rare and uncommon a patina
that many years untouched
until I took it up
and turning, entranced, down the
unpainted
stair,
to the hallway where I swear
I never heard the first shot.
The copper-jacketed slug recovered
from the bathroom's cardboard cylinder
of
Morton's
Salt
was undeformed
save for the faint bright marks
of lands
and grooves
so hot, stilled energy,
it blistered my hand.
The gun lay on the dusty carpet.
Returning in utter awe I took it
so carefully up
That the second shot, equally unintended,
notched
the hardwood bannister and brought
a strange
bright smell of ancient sap to life
in a beam
of dusty sunlight.
Absolutely
alone
in awareness
of the mechanism.
Like the first time you put your
mouth
on a woman.
(ll.
105-144)
"The Mechanism" is all about
discontinuity:
The digital principle (the binarism
of "dividing that from this")
Modularity
Automation (cf., the hidden automation
of Wordsworth's passage about the One
Life)
Variability
Transcoding
As we will see when we read Gibson's Neuromancer,
the true "mechanism" for him is not
old media or guns but the computer
1798