Abstract
This chapter turns to projects that think about and through the digital structures of data and databases, and the mobility of digital cameras. These projects explore how digital media disrupts conventional structures by prompting a rethinking of the concept of documenting that foregrounds spatiality over temporality, relationality over causality, and automated functions over auteurist choice. We draw on Christiane Paul’s description of a shift “from ‘mapping’ to ‘tagging’ as the new paradigm of dynamic classification, context creation, and meaning production” in digital media.1 Digital technologies not only map our anatomy, they tag our identity. We are becoming digital through biometrics (e.g., dates of birth, shoe sizes) in state and corporate databases and digital profiles in social media. Our digital identities exist as data in databases, which suggests that we can document ourselves or be documented by someone else, including an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled bot, without ever having to appear on camera. Comparably, mobile cameras and sensors also allow movements that are not constrained to human perspectives or abilities. More profound than a majestic crane-shot in the latest Hollywood blockbuster, mobile cameras can be harnessed to document spatial relations for further analysis.
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Notes
Christiane Paul, “Contextual Networks: Data, Identity, and Collective Production,” in Context Providers: Conditions of Meaning in Media Arts, ed. Margot Lovejoy, Christiane Paul, and Victoria Vesna (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2011): 110.
Ursula Biemann, “Performing Borders: The Transnational Video,” Stuff It! The Video Essay in the Digital Age, ed. Ursula Biemann (Zürich: Edition Voldemeer/Institute for Theory of Art and Design, 2003): 86, 89.
Kinder, Marsha, “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative,” Film Quarterly 55.4 (Summer 2002): 6.
N. Katherine Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012): 4.
Leo Enticknap, Moving Image Technology: From Zoetrope to Digital (London: Wallflower, 2005): 203.
Vivian Sobchack, “The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic ‘Presence’” (1994), in Technology and Culture, ed. Andrew Utterson (New York and London: Routledge, 2005): 132.
Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2001): 20–22, 77.
Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Introduction: Did Somebody Say New Media?” New Media, Old Media: A History and Theory Reader, ed. Chun and Thomas Keenan (New York and London: Routledge, 2006): 1–2.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (1969), trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1972): 129.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1996): 19.
Mark Tribe and Reena Jana, New Media Art (Köln: Taschen, 2007): 64–65.
Rachel Greene, Internet Art (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004): 99–100.
Analysis of Goobalization is adapted from Dale Hudson, “Undisclosed Recipients: Database Documentaries and the Internet,” an essay in dialogue with Sharon Lin Tay, “Undisclosed Recipients: Documentary in an Era of Digital Convergence,” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (February 2008): 79–98.
Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu, Who Controls the Internet?: Illusions of a Borderless World (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2006): 61.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991): 35
See artists’ statement: Nadine Hillbert and Gast Bouschet, “The Trustfiles,” Leonardo Electronic Almanac 14. 5–6 (25 September 2006), http://leoalmanac.org/gallery/newmediap/trust.htm.
Javier Martinez Luque and Izaskun Etxebarria Madinabeitia, “UrbanWorld, Hyperreality Laboratory,” in Inédios 2006: Traducciones/Translations, trans. Tom Skipp (Madrid: Mundo Urbano/Laboratorio de Hiperrealidad, 2007): 173.
Helmut Draxler, “How Can We Perceive Sound as Art,” Sound, ed. Caleb Kelly (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2011): 141.
See “The Toywar-story,” eToy (n.d), http://toywar.etoy.com/; and Adam Wishart and Regula Bochsler, Leaving Reality Behind: etoy Vs. eToys.com and Other Battles to Control Cyberspace (New York: Eddo, 2003).
Ulises Ali Mejias, Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013): 7.
Trebor Scholz, ed., Digital Labor: The Internet as Playground and Factory (London and New York: Routledge, 2013).
David Hogarth, Realer than Reel: Global Dimensions in Documentary (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006): 127–129.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, “The Totalizing Quest for Meaning,” Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York and London: Routledge, 1993): 90.
Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Digital Film Event (London and New York: Routledge, 2005): 107.
For a discussion of policy’s effect on shifting migration from California to Arizona, see Bill Ong Hing, Defining America through Immigration Policy (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004): 189.
Erich W. Schienke and IAA, “On the Outside Looking Out: An Interview with the Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA),” Surveillance and Society 1.1 (2002): 104.
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York and London: New York University Press, 2006): 4.
See Helga Tawil-Souri, “Cinema as the Space to Transgress Palestine’s Territorial Trap,” Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 7 (2014): 169–189.
See Jasmine Garsd and Encarni Pindado, “Crossing the Border in the Age of the Selfie,” Fusion.net (28 May 2014), http://fusion.net/justice/story/crossing-border-age-selfie-724338.
Kelly A. Gates, Our Biometric Future: Facial Recognition Technology and the Culture of Surveillance (New York and London: New York University Press, 2011): 22.
Awam Amkpa, “Africa: Colonial Photography and Outlaws of History,” African Photography from the Walther Collection: Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive, ed. Tamar Garb (Göttingen: Steidl Verlag, 2013): 241–252.
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (1995), trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago and London: University of Chicago, 1996): 19.
Gerard Goggin, Global Mobile Media (New York and London: Routledge, 2011): 40.
Based on 2003 Polish study cited in GSM Association, Mobile Phone Lifecycles Use, Take-back, Reuse and Recycle (October 2006): 4.
Charles W. Schmidt, “Unfair Trade e-Waste in Africa,” Environmental Health Perspectives 114.4 (April 2006): A232–A235.
Hong-Gang Ni and Eddy Y. Zeng, “Law Enforcement and Global Collaboration are the Keys to Containing E-Waste Tsunami in China,” Environmental Science Technology 43.11 (2009): 3991–3994.
Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (1960; rpt. Princeton and London: Princeton University Press, 1997).
Ibid.; Tom Gunning, “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995): 114–133.
See Scott MacDonald, “Indonesia in Motion: An Interview With Leonard Retel Helmrich,” Film Quarterly 63.3 (spring 2010): 35–41.
For an analysis of the trilogy according to conventional expectations from visual anthropology, see James B. Hoesterey, “Single-Shot Cinema and Ethnographic Sympathy in Contemporary Indonesia: A Review Essay on The Eye of the Day (2001), The Shape of the Moon (2004), and Position among the Stars (2011) by Leonard Retel Helmrich,” Visual Anthropology Review 30.1 (spring 2014): 85–88.
See Tamara Aberle, “Constructing the Future: An Interview with PM Toh,” Asian Theatre Journal 31. 1 (Spring 2014): 290–309.
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© 2015 Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmermann
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Hudson, D., Zimmermann, P.R. (2015). Documenting Databases and Mobilizing Cameras. In: Thinking Through Digital Media. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137433633_4
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