Modernism = "Cinema"

story © Michael Betancourt | published February 12, 2018 | permalink |  |  

“Cinema” has always been linked to Modernist aesthetics: the definitions of commercial film, the avant-garde film, and video art as autonomous, independent and entirely separate from each other argues against their contextual influences and the hybrid crossings between them. The historical organization of “cinema” as a serious art form in the 1960s and 1970s linked the earlier selections of “great films” to an explicitly Modernist conception of motion pictures as an essentially realist, narrative form whose connections to the American art critic Clement Greenberg’s teleological “purity” was revealed by the parallel articulation of the “structural film” in the avant-garde cinema by P. Adams Sitney. This Modernist heritage shapes the debates over “postcinema,” a reflected in the “great films” re-used as foundational axioms. This conception of “cinema” makes the contemporary challenge by digital technology emergent in “postcinema” inevitable as this model requires a denial of the convergences created by computer technology.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published January 9, 2018 | permalink |  |  

story © Michael Betancourt | published January 3, 2018 | permalink |  |  

“Materiality” for the digital describes an ambivalent relationship between two distinct, but overlapping, understandings of “materialism.” The first is familiar from art history and criticism: the literal substance of the digital—the electronic signals that encode binary data. This digital code is what enables computer operations and is the substance of all electronic files. Artistic and aesthetic engagements with the materiality of the digital are addressed to the technological and semiotic functioning of encoded files and the use of computer languages. In manipulating these features of digital technology, artists (and critics) are addressing the materiality of that technology and its active role evident in even the most banal or prosaic uses of computer and digital technologies. This first meaning for “materiality” has an extensive use in the discussion and analysis of technological and computer art, and is apparent from the recurring emphasis on computer programming in the evaluation of digital art. The materialist engagement with the technology itself is a precursor to the differentiation between art addressed to the machine, and art that addresses what the machine can make. This understanding of digital materiality transforms computer software and hardware (“computer art”) into an analogue for the same formal relations from other artistic media such as “painting”—it recreates a conception where the manipulation of software/paint on the hardware/canvas brings the realm of digital art into a coherent parallel to older, established media, allowing the transfer of the art historical conceptions of materiality to apply to the discussion and analysis of the digital.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 8, 2017 | permalink |  |  

The Modernist desire for transcendence common to abstraction and abstract art generally is an attempt to escape from the physical repressions of industrial capitalism, a translation of the alienation of capitalist social valorization into a rejection and alienation from physicality. This erasure of the physical world from consideration becomes internalized as the aura of the digital's effacement of concern with physicality and matierial restrictions, giving these rejections an esoteric, theological significance as an appeal to and instantiation of an immaterial realm accessed through the digital computer.

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story © Michael Betancourt | published December 7, 2017 | permalink |  |  

An erasure of ontological distinctions plays a crucial role in the commodification of human labor as an assumption of equivalence between not only differently skilled labor, but the products of that labor: that the variable quality of production does not figure into its valuations. This basis is innate to the question Karl Marx addresses at the start of his analysis, “Why is labor represented by the value of its product (commodities), and labor time by the magnitude of that value?,” which reveals equivalence as a foundational, even necessary part of the definition of capitalism. Although exchange value arises from social activity, it is at the same time dependent on the suspension of difference—equivalence reifies the commodity form as an abstraction apart from its materiality, a separation that recalls the aura of the digital—returning digital capitalism to its origins in the industrial labor. Marx’s analytic enshrines equivalence by setting aside distinctions between high and low quality, as well as between skilled and unskilled labor, in order to advance an abstraction of that productive process that depended on the assumption of the interchangeability of commodities, labor, and capital. His disregard for the material and qualitative differences between commodities mirrored the labor-intensive manufacturing processes of the period when he developed his critique: the concern with the productive capabilities of labor as a constraint on production provides a literal limit on quantity, valuation, and quality of the productive labor performed, for example, by the unskilled child labor employed in the factories Marx was considering. This issue—child labor—is an implicit and unacknowledged component assumption for his analytic, one that simultaneously passes without comment in its construction but that guides the conclusions he derives.

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