http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/index.php?issue=3
But there is something more at stake here than the planned obsolescence of the technology industries. The environmental destruction and increasing toxicity of our planet during the past half-century is symptomatic of a seeming inability to look beyond the next quarter's profit-loss reports. It is this tendency toward short-sightedness that prompts The Long Now Foundation to carry the year out to five numerical places (e.g., 02006), a subtle reminder of our own decidedly transient role in the history of this planet. Do we dare take comfort in the notion (mixing equal parts Nietzsche and Andy Warhol) that our fifteen minutes of "world history" are nearly up? Since the previous issue of Vectors launched, the average age of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court dropped from 72 to 66. All indications suggest that the Roberts court, like the current administration's "war on terror," will be with us for a very long time. Many of the beliefs that once seemed most deeply etched in our national psyche — ideologies of freedom and privacy, for example — may be the very things that must be asserted most vigorously in the decades to come.

This issue of Vectors is not intended as a celebration of ephemerality, but rather a gesture of respect for the fleeting nature of the present and the material consequences of the past. Historical investigations, as Carlo Ginzburg argues, are sometimes most productive when they look for meaning in the least likely places. Each of the projects in this issue attempts to take seriously the significance of cultural artifacts that would otherwise be forgotten or overwhelmed by more official documents and discourses of history. The voices that reach us via things that were meant to be forgotten may in fact speak most eloquently to the imperatives and contradictions of our present historical moment. It is with equal degrees of irony and hopefulness that we present these works of excavation, rumination and preservation in a form that will soon confront its own likely disappearance.]]> en-us Tue, 10 Jun 2009 04:00:00 GMT usc.vectors@gmail.com http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/03_issue/slaveryephemera/
Slavery's Ephemera pries open these affective registers and powerfully insists that the plantation be reanimated via its many complex, embedded, and embodied histories. Designed as a companion piece to Judith Jackson Fossett's book manuscript on the lingering presence of the plantation today, the project reflects upon and recombines the results of three extensive research trips to antebellum sites in southern Louisiana. In authoring an 'alternative narrative' of plantation geographies and architectures, Fossett, working with Erik Loyer, also crafts an alternative immersive experience. The tour they construct refuses the neat linearity and simple closures that dominate the experience of the traditional plantation tour. As you explore the piece, you are not led through a carefully orchestrated narrative along a lovely landscaped path. Rather, you encounter various sites, artifacts, and images that seemingly float free of one place or one time. Juxtaposition and layering replace linear history, highlighting the ephemeral status of our encounters with slavery's remnants as well as the ideological stakes of tourist history.

What's to be gained by the modes of collision such an experimental format underwrites? Interacting with the piece sets in motion a number of elements: key words flow down the river, jamming up at various points while sometimes racing away from the inquisitive cursor; provocative phrases fade in and out of sight; images overlay the terrain. The parts never coalesce into a neat whole; a nostalgic plantation image abuts a chemical plant; tourist souvenirs bump up against histories of oppression; real estate ads meet academic prose. As such, Slavery's Ephemera replays at the experiential level the schizophrenia that so characterizes American sentiments about the South. The region has long served as a screen upon which we project various fears, hopes, and fantasies. This project refuses to fix the meaning of the South in a single moment or image while also underscoring the many things the region can still teach us. For Fossett, the material and ephemeral culture of the South have much to tell us about the nation and the world.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/03_issue/slaveryephemera/ http://panorama.vectorsjournal.org/
In 2005, Prelinger completed a feature film titled Panorama Ephemera, a meditative chronicle remarkably free of the camp humor of many ephemeral remixes. The images and sounds presented in Prelinger's film are treated with meticulous respect for their materiality and status as signifying objects. Each shot or sequence in the film forms part of a "cognitive map" of American history, revealing patterns of obsession that orbit around such mundane but foundational themes as growing food, Westward migration, the transformation of landscape, and the development of democracy, as well as relationships among animals, humans, nature and civilization.

The online version of Panorama Ephemera, created in collaboration with Vectors Art Director Raegan Kelly, is similarly devoted to preserving the integrity of individual media elements, while interweaving them with Prelinger's own personal and professional trajectories, milestones and musings. Perhaps most interesting is the opportunity this project provides to explore Prelinger's personal history via the artifacts by which his career has been defined. In foregrounding Prelinger's personal history as a lens through which to view the films, Panorama Ephemera models a form of historiography, that underscores the inevitability of authorial intervention in the process of assembling a historical narrative.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://panorama.vectorsjournal.org/ http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/03_issue/objectOfMediaStudies/ Dukes of Hazzard TV dinner tray to a R.E.M. 45 I can no longer play, my office and home overflow with various artifacts of popular media culture. We might see these things simply as the detritus of the relentless commercialism of the culture industries, ephemeral stuff now rescued from obscurity through various expeditions to thrift stores and E-bay, but Amelie Hastie and her collaborators here invite us to understand these objects differently. Both in their materiality and in the affective chains of pleasure and desire that they do (or do not) activate, such objects point the way to new directions for media studies. In her evocative exploration of a seventy-year-old powder box, one of eight object 'biographies' in Objects of Media Studies, Mary Desjardins sketches new interpretative paradigms for the stuff of culture. Following her insights, my board game, taken seriously, just might "help us capture and understand the dream factory's relation to the self in modernity." However, OMS does not restrict its analyses of the objects of media studies to the souvenir or the collectible. Instead, across its many screens and avenues of reading, OMS surveys a diverse array of 'media objects,' some perhaps expected, others quite surprising.

What is at stake in such investigations? While the scholars brought together here all respect their objects in their very materiality, they also push against a recent turn in media studies toward a certain neo-formalism. Convergent with an explosion of work on new media, a heightened concern with media specificity has often functioned to sever media texts from their contexts. Objects of Media Studies moves us from media specificity to object specificity, but this attention to the object resists any easy formalism or a new instance of fetishization. This is a specificity of the object that is at once precise and profoundly relational, sketching circuits of exchange both between the various objects surveyed and between each object and its larger contextual frames. These frames are personal, political, ideological, cross-cultural, economic, and historical. They help us understand, as one section title claims, that matter matters.

This relationality is emphasized by many of the individual authors (for example, when Lisa Parks directs our attention to the seemingly ephemeral networks emanating from antenna trees.) But it is also a function of the very form of the project. Like all Vectors' projects, OMS is an experiment in the relation of form to content and, as such, it demands new modes of reading. Faced with its quilted array of screens, the temptation might be to click, click, click. But this project needs more than your glance and your touch pad (although you should also certainly engage the tactility of the piece). It invites you to look and to navigate but also to read, asking for and, indeed, requiring your attention. This reading can unfold along several axes: vertically (to follow a single object); horizontally (to navigate Hastie's piecing together of the individual object narratives); thematically; or, more promiscuously, in zig-zagged paths of your own construction. What is gained by these various paths of reading and seeing? The very experience of relationality, of eight objects hovering in space and time, all shot through with desire, affect, collaboration, politics, and tension.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/03_issue/objectOfMediaStudies/ http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/03_issue/goldenage/recollection.php
However, the stories that historians choose to tell about the past are often inextricably entangled with their own personality quirks and idiosyncratic obsessions. If we are honest about it, the narratives we pursue probably consist of as many dead-ends, digressions and anachronies as neatly packaged elements of a grand historical narrative. It is a rare work of history that not only acknowledges this, but seeks to weave it into the fabric of the historical work itself, becoming a strength rather than a liability. So it is with Melanie Swalwell's Cast-Offs From the Golden Age, created in collaboration with Vectors Art Director Erik Loyer.

In order to experience the largely unexamined history of video games in New Zealand, Swalwell asks us to retrace some of her steps ”" and occasional missteps ”" in seeking to discover this arcane and fragmented history. Swalwell's project refuses to deliver a comprehensive history, choosing instead to allegorize the research process by embedding bits of information within an information space. The implication is that, following Michel Foucault, all history is rightly conceived of in terms of fragmentation and partiality. The seductive narrative of the definitive, totalizing history is both mendacious and misleading. Swalwell's investigation is part exploration and part role-playing-game, as different facts reveal themselves with each traversal of the research space. Although probably a source of frustration for "Dragnet historians" (those hoping to receive "just the facts"), the rewards of engaging fully with the dynamics of Swalwell and Loyers possibility space are as formidable as that of any totalizing historical narrative.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/03_issue/goldenage/recollection.php http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/03_issue/digitaldynamics/ Digital Dynamics Across Cultures re-imagines the work of anthropology in the age of digital reproduction, and, by extension, explores the cross-cultural implications of several seeming truisms of the electronic era. While the libertarian impulses and voices fueling the gold rush mentality of Silicon Valley's dot.com period often insisted that "information wants to be free," Kim Christen here reveals the peculiarly Western bias of such claims. Drawing on materials collected in more than a decade of field work, Christen and her collaborators have created a complex, multimedia artifact that moves far beyond Discovery Channel-type explorations of cultural difference. Instead, the project models the unique systems of belief and of shared ownership that underpin Warumungu knowledge production and reproduction, including a system of "protocols" that limit access to information or to images in accordance with Aboriginal systems of accountability.

The site is experiential, but it does not presume cultural experience to be something we should take for granted as a birth right of the digital age. Digital Dynamics Across Cultures does not invite the (Western) viewer to "become Aboriginal" or to assume another's identity, that avatar-based standard of so many products of digital culture. Rather, the experiences it constructs are partial, embedded, and provisional, barring access to specific images or performances, in a manner consistent with the logics or protocols of the Warumungu people. As such, the site stages a series of complex negotiations that trouble easy binary assumptions about the nature of intellectual property, the boundaries between the public and private, and the relationship of self to both place and history.

Digital Dynamics Across Cultures denies the tourist's gaze, refusing to fix the Warumungu as objects for our consumption, either embalmed in a distant past or locked in an electronic present. The algorithmically-driven database structure of the project means that only a small slice of its vast contents is available during any one visit. The materials available for exploration shift and mutate with each click of the refresh button, highlighting the ephemeral nature of digital forms and of any sense that we might systematically be able to know "the Other." The project also demands an ongoing process of collaboration and dialogue between Christen and the Warumungu, as the protocols it models require that the database be consistently updated to reflect changes in the community. Such a process underscores that the mutability of digital forms reaches far beyond the database to the lived worlds we all inhabit.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://www.vectorsjournal.org/issues/03_issue/digitaldynamics/ http://crowds.stanford.edu/withflash.html
Undertaken as a multi-year research project of the Stanford Humanities Lab, Crowds productively considers these and other aspects of the crowd as a powerful cultural, political, and historical phenomenon. The site brings together an extensive database of writings, images, sound files, videos, and other artifacts in order to query whether or not, following Gustave Le Bon, we still live in "the era of crowds". Across the many points of view offered in the site (and in the ancillary materials that form the larger project), Crowds allows us to slice through various takes on how such public gatherings emerge and, more importantly, on how they function.

The project also explores the degree to which crowds evince a tension between the one and the many, the individual and the mass. In one of the site's 'testimonies', Michael Hardt distinguishes the multitude from the crowd, noting that "the concept of the multitude is meant to name a set of singularities," while the crowd often slips into the faceless mob or mass. In its very structure, in its lines and grids, Crowds draws upon this notion of singularity within unity, creating a rich, multi-perspectival investigation of public gatherings that at once respects the macro and the micro, the one and the many. Its bits and pieces, its individual players (from the furrowed brow of that marcher from Selma to the catty commentary of Jessica Burnstein), remain distinct even while they collectively paint a larger picture. The project stages an intermedial and transdisciplinary approach to its subject matter that simultaneously functions as a model of expanded scholarship, translating the work of the academy for broader public consumption, both on the internet and in various museum settings. Finally, in its invitation to curate a new gallery or add a new testimony, Crowds also creates a possible space for public dialogue, inviting someone to tell the stories of the anti-immigration protests that are unfolding as I type.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://crowds.stanford.edu/withflash.html http://hurricanearchive.org/ Hurricane Digital Memory Bank (HDMB) provides a vibrant model of just such an endeavor, functioning as a re-imagined archive, one conceived for the present and the future.

Over 500 images, numerous stories, and diverse other files -- including podcasts, PDFs, and more -- chronicle the powerful storms that ravaged the Gulf Coast region in fall 2005 and document the experiences of those affected by the worst hurricane season in recorded history. As the user traverses the words and pictures gathered here, the human and material costs of the hurricanes come into more powerful relief, adding a new level of granularity, intimacy, and poignancy to mainstream media accounts. We know that Hurricane Katrina unleashed the largest displacement in U.S. history; HDMB layers that knowledge with detailed meanings and diverse voices. In my introduction to the second issue of Vectors, I commented on the limits of putting too much faith in technology when faced with a disaster like Katrina. HDMB suggests that technology can also help us connect, remember, and perhaps heal.

The website reconfigures the goals of traditional oral history projects via a meaningful collision with electronic media, creating a space not only for the preservation of memory and experience (a lofty aim in and of itself) but also for emergent modes of interpretation and knowledge management. For instance, the site's 'map browser' allows users to pinpoint the geographic location of a story or an image, while also inviting a comparative analysis of how different neighborhoods or regions were impacted. The site's search function allows this archive to respond to its viewers own interests and desires, while the 'contribute' field encourages additions and reflections, opening the collection up to expansion and growth. To date, many of the pieces published in Vectors in some way work as analogues to more traditional scholarly artifacts, re-making and re-imagining the article in rich multimedia dimensions or supplementing the constraints of the monograph via an expanded archive. Projects like this one push in another direction that the journal is eager to explore, toward a more connected and networked scholarly vernacular.

HDMB simultaneously displays and extends the pioneering work undertaken by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Since the early 1990s, the Center has actively modeled vibrant new modes of public history while exploring the power of the internet to expand our conceptions of what counts in and as an archive. Their work troubles a number of binaries long reified by history scholars (and humanities scholars more generally), including one/many, closed/open, expert/amateur, scholarship/journalism, and research/pedagogy. We are pleased to feature their work here.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://hurricanearchive.org/ http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/
What then, are we to make of a project like Agrippa (a book of the dead), an art book that was created in 1992 by novelist William Gibson, artist Dennis Ashbaugh and publisher Kevin Begos, in order to deliberately confound the cultural imperative to preserve both art and digital culture? Agrippa's creators dreamed of creating an object that would elude the best intentions of both archivists and historians, using fading images and an encryption scheme that would destroy lines of a digitally generated poem as soon as they were read. Ironically, creating an object that ensured its own self-destruction proved to be somewhat more difficult than expected, leaving nearly 100 of the books in various states of preservation. Perhaps the most ambitious attempt to collect and analyze Agrippa was undertaken by the Transcriptions Project, a group of researchers at U.C. Santa Barbara. Their resulting online archive, The Agrippa Files, brings together a vast array of information about the book, along with a profusion of surrounding documentation that is part of its legacy.

What makes The Agrippa Files a remarkable work of digital scholarship is the sophistication with which it pursues the notion of a concrete object at the center of its investigation. Far from simply fetishizing the book and its notoriety, The Transcriptions group explores ways of making Agrippa available to the world as both a concept and a physical object, presenting, for example, simulations of Ashbaugh's largely unsuccessful attempt at inserting disappearing images in the book. Likewise, the text of Gibson's auto-encrypting poem is notably absent from the project, apparently as a result of rights issues, but coincidentally offering an allegory for the impossibility of retrieving the thing itself.]]> Tue, 03 Jun 2009 09:39:21 GMT http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/