Page 117 - Darko Štrajn, From Walter Benjamin to the End of Cinema: Identities, Illusion and Signification. Ljubljana: Educational Research Institute, 2017. Digital Library, Dissertationes, 29.
P. 117
the principle of montage and literature
Similar to photography, cinema, and video, this technology creates fasci-
nating effects. Of course, Benjamin’s epistemological break, as expressed in
the notion of aura, still serves as an explanatory theoretical instance. Nev-
ertheless, it seems that a change produced by digital technology requires
much more than just a kind of quantitative comparison with the impact of
mechanical reproduction. “To use a metaphor from computer culture, new
media turns all culture and cultural theory into open source. This ‘opening
up’ of all cultural techniques, conventions, forms and concepts is ultimate-
ly the most positive cultural effect of computerization—the opportunity to
see the world and the human being anew, in ways which were not available
to ‘A Man with a Movie Camera’” (Manovich, 2002: p. 333).
The advent of digital technology has had a huge impact on a wide
range of conditions for production of visual representations in artistic and
all other known senses, commencing already at the time of “analogue” tel-
evision as a “mediatic flow” in Raymond Williams‘ (1974) words (see es-
pecially chapter four of his book). The impact of ICT on the form of writ-
ten documents, diverse genres, including aesthetically marked narratives,
necessitates a rethinking of the relationship between literature and mov-
ing pictures, now appearing in many other shapes and on other ubiquitous
screens than just on celluloid film and on silver screens in cinemas. How-
ever, one must take into account the fact that any thinking about this rela-
tionship already implies ongoing changes of both occurrences of culture:
literature and the media. In new settings of communication, some forms
and phenomena of (re)presentation with a vast number of combinations of
means of narration have yet to be recognized as a kind of, say, literature or
at least documents of reality within virtual reality and vice versa. As Mano-
vich observes in his last book, software is at the centre of these new real-
ities and, by virtue of being used by hundreds of millions of people, soft-
ware becomes “cultural software” (Manovich, 2013). What one should look
for, especially considering the field of literature and new very “democra-
tized” uses of moving pictures, are therefore not so much some very com-
plex phenomena of so-called computer art, but mass usage of interactive
media, within which some forms of narrating, taking different views, com-
menting, expressing anxieties, accumulating memory, playing with identi-
ties, and disrupting many notions of objectivity are taking place. In tran-
scending the boundaries between text and pictures, and between static and
moving pictures, narration in the digital media results from de-montage of
115
Similar to photography, cinema, and video, this technology creates fasci-
nating effects. Of course, Benjamin’s epistemological break, as expressed in
the notion of aura, still serves as an explanatory theoretical instance. Nev-
ertheless, it seems that a change produced by digital technology requires
much more than just a kind of quantitative comparison with the impact of
mechanical reproduction. “To use a metaphor from computer culture, new
media turns all culture and cultural theory into open source. This ‘opening
up’ of all cultural techniques, conventions, forms and concepts is ultimate-
ly the most positive cultural effect of computerization—the opportunity to
see the world and the human being anew, in ways which were not available
to ‘A Man with a Movie Camera’” (Manovich, 2002: p. 333).
The advent of digital technology has had a huge impact on a wide
range of conditions for production of visual representations in artistic and
all other known senses, commencing already at the time of “analogue” tel-
evision as a “mediatic flow” in Raymond Williams‘ (1974) words (see es-
pecially chapter four of his book). The impact of ICT on the form of writ-
ten documents, diverse genres, including aesthetically marked narratives,
necessitates a rethinking of the relationship between literature and mov-
ing pictures, now appearing in many other shapes and on other ubiquitous
screens than just on celluloid film and on silver screens in cinemas. How-
ever, one must take into account the fact that any thinking about this rela-
tionship already implies ongoing changes of both occurrences of culture:
literature and the media. In new settings of communication, some forms
and phenomena of (re)presentation with a vast number of combinations of
means of narration have yet to be recognized as a kind of, say, literature or
at least documents of reality within virtual reality and vice versa. As Mano-
vich observes in his last book, software is at the centre of these new real-
ities and, by virtue of being used by hundreds of millions of people, soft-
ware becomes “cultural software” (Manovich, 2013). What one should look
for, especially considering the field of literature and new very “democra-
tized” uses of moving pictures, are therefore not so much some very com-
plex phenomena of so-called computer art, but mass usage of interactive
media, within which some forms of narrating, taking different views, com-
menting, expressing anxieties, accumulating memory, playing with identi-
ties, and disrupting many notions of objectivity are taking place. In tran-
scending the boundaries between text and pictures, and between static and
moving pictures, narration in the digital media results from de-montage of
115
