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Analogue and Digital

Sean Cubitt
Theory Culture Society 2006; 23; 250
DOI: 10.1177/0263276406023002151

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14_aesthetic_062680 10/5/06 10:27 am
250 Theory, Culture & Society 23(2–3)
Wolf, N. (1990) The Beauty Myth. London:
Chatto and Windus.
Analogue and Digital
Sean Cubitt
Keywords aesthetics, analogue, digital
I
n the brief 50 years of its history, computer arts
have given rise to a number of schools. Early
practitioners like Jordan Belson were inter-
ested in machinic contributions to the spritual
aspects of abstraction noted in the early 20th
century by Malevich, Kandinsky and Mondrian.
Certain artists insist that only engineering in
software and hardware constitutes digital art,
while the use of existing programs and machines
is dilletantism. Other schools have focused on
interactivity, immersion or networking as constitu-
tive factors of a distinctively digital art. And some
artists (Young Hae Cheung, Vuk Cosic) renounce
all high-level programming and interaction. While
some commentators, especially in the 1990s,
sought to distinguish the digital aesthetic from all
previous aesthetic modes, increasingly scholars and
critics have come round to a disputed and various
but common belief in continuities between digital
and previous arts.
The distinction when stated technically is
minor. Analogue media like photography create an
analogy with the world observed by establishing a
one-to-one correspondence between, in this
example, light falling on a surface, and the light-
responsive chemicals applied to it. Such corre-
spondences underpinned late 19th and early 20th
century theories of realism and technologies of
fidelity in fields like recorded music and cine-
matography. Digital media use a different system.
Instead of tracking the real in the manner of a
phonograph needle agitated by the vibrations of
the air, digital devices sample ambient sound in
discrete packages. Though the sampling rate is
extremely fast, and gives therefore a more
accurate rendering of the realia recorded, there is
inevitably a minute gap between samples which
the digital recording can never fill, unlike analogue,
whose relatively sluggish response is nonetheless
continuous rather than sampled.
The apparent simplicity of the distinction
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Page 250
Leora Farber (MAFA cum laude, 1992) is an artist
and Senior Lecturer in Fine Arts at the University
of Johannesburg, specializing in post-graduate
supervision and research.
masks a more significant property of digital
storage. Data held in a computer is stored as an
array of digits encoded as electrical impulses,
magnetic orientation or optical arrays. From the
standpoint of the computer, any input will always
appear as mathematical, and any data can be
output in any format. Effectively, an audio input
can be output as a video image, as text, as a 3D
model, as an instruction set for a manufacturing
process, or any other digital format that can be
attached to the computer. The manipulability of
the data once stored, though not unprecedented,
is easily accessible to ordinary computer users, and
proliferates in montage and in the alteration of
photographs, texts and digital recordings. Several
authors have attempted to use such effects as
distinguishing factors in describing a single,
universal digital aesthetic. However, in the early
years of the 21st century, it became apparent not
only that older aesthetic principles still hold good
in such areas as digitally animated films and digi-
tally generated dance music, but that many modes
of software have evolved their own specific
aesthetic properties and practices. In visual media,
the distinction between bitmap (‘raster’) graphics,
based on a grid, and vector graphics based on
algorithms, has become the basis of discrete
analyses of the aesthetics of specific programs and
software interfaces (for example Munster, 2003),
while computer games (Aarseth, 1997), ‘post-
cinema’ (Shaw and Weibel, 2003) and various
modes of digital music (Miller, 2004) have increas-
ingly been distinguished from any unitary
aesthetic. The proliferation of digital media across
professional disciplines, and the increasing embed-
ding of digital media invisibly within architecture,
artefacts and human beings indicates both that the
unification of digital aesthetics around any core
group of properties is decreasingly likely, and that
the specificity of the digital may decline as digital
media are more and more embedded in the land-
scapes of everyday work, transport, housework
and education. Alternatively, this embedding
process may herald the end of aesthetics as a
preserve of leisure (‘disinterested’) activities.
14_aesthetic_062680 10/5/06 10:27 am
References
Aarseth, Espen (1997) Cybertext: Perspectives on
Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Miller, Paul D., aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal
Kid (2004) Rhythm Science. Cambridge, MA:
Mediawork/MIT Press.
Munster, Anna (2003) ‘Compression and the
Intensification of Visual Information in Flash
Aesthetics’, pp. 150–9 in Adrian Miles (ed.)
Melbourne DAC 2003 streamingworlds,
proceedings of the 5th International Digital
Arts and Culture Conference, Melbourne
Persian Poesis
Michael M.J. Fischer
Keywords cultural politics, ethical dilemmas,
hieroglyphic imagery, Iranian cinema, new
media circuits
I
n the 1990s, Iranian film became the most cele-
brated of national film traditions because of a
poetics, a poesis, that speaks to the contempor-
ary condition. It is a poesis that is deeply informed
both by modernist traditions (many leading Iranian
filmmakers attended film schools in Europe and
the United States) and by Iran’s own cosmopolitan
traditions – a double play paralleling those of
French New Wave films in the 1950s and 1960s, of
Italian neorealist films in the 1940s and 1950s,
Eastern European films in the 1960s and
1970s, and Chinese Fifth Generation films in the
1980s and 1990s. French New Wave films played
a part both in remaking postwar France through
images of ‘fast cars, clean bodies, decolonization
and the reordering of French culture’, as Kristin
Ross titled her 1995 book, and, reciprocally, in
providing international images for rethinking
Hollywood and the images of American modernity.
So too, films from Iran in the 1990s and early 21st
century speak to their own domestic cultural
politics and at the same time to more general
ethical dilemmas in a world torn apart and pushed
together. There is something about the minimal-
ism, deliberate pacing and subjectivities of these
films that speaks to a world caught in the after-
math of religious tensors (stoicisms, purity logics,
disciplinary moralists) and in the aftermath of wars
received no longer stoically but through the recog-
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© 2006 Theory, Culture & Society Ltd.. All rights reserved. Not for commercial use or unauthorized distribution.
Page 251
Problematizing Global Knowledge – The Aesthetic 251
DAC, May. Melbourne: RMIT University
School of Applied Communication.
Shaw, Jeffrey and Peter Weibel (eds) 2003)
Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary
after Film. Karlsruhe: ZKM and Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Sean Cubitt is Professor of Screen and Media
Studies at the University of Waikato, New
Zealand. His most recent publications include
Digital Aesthetics (Sage, 1998), Simulation and
Social Theory (Sage, 2001), The Cinema Effect
(MIT, 2004) and EcoMedia (Rodopi, 2005).
nition of post-traumatic stress syndrome and the
increasing use of trauma as a metaphor of and for
the current human condition.
This double function can be seen in the image
of plastic and wooden prostheses dropping from
the sky on parachutes to one-legged Afghans
running on their crutches to catch these inter-
national relief offerings (in Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s
2001 film Journey to Kandahar, Safar-e
Qandahar). Images of mine-devastated bodies and
countries are global ones, not particularly Iranian
ones. Yet this image joins a series of strong hiero-
glyphic images in recent Iranian films. The titles
already are visual: Shrapnels in Peace being
recycled as scrap metal, Blackboards doubling as
protection against helicopter gunships, Rain filling
footprints, Red Ribbons marking off mined land,
The Time of the Drunken Horses (mules) being
used to cross borders by subsistence smugglers,
cameras functioning as the inability to forget
trauma and poverty (Marriage of the Blessed) and
as alternative courts of appeal (Close Up), recycled
antennae to determine when the Americans will
invade Iraq (Turtles Also Can Fly). For American
and Western audiences, this emergent visual idiom
provides both counter-discourse (what war does in
the name of ‘collateral damage’) and a profound
commonality (we are all invested in the ideals of
justice, cooperation, dealing with each life as
precious, freedom and ethical choice).
The uptake of Persian imagery into cosmo-
politan circuits goes back to at least the Gathas of
Zoroaster, acknowledged in classical Greek texts,
absorbed into the eschatological imagery of the
monotheisms, and paralleled in the Vedas of India.