THE PAGE in the SCREEN: VISUALIZED INFORMATION and the AESTHETICS of the DIGITAL IMAGE Jacob T

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THE PAGE IN THE SCREEN: VISUALIZED INFORMATION AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE DIGITAL IMAGE Jacob T. Watson

A dissertation submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Department of English and Comparative Literature.

Chapel Hill 2019

Approved by:

Gregory Flaxman

Florence Dore

Mark B.N. Hansen

Matthew Taylor

Rick Warner

Henry Veggian

ABSTRACT

Jacob T. Watson: The Page in the Screen: Visualized Information and the Aesthetics of the Digital Image (Under the direction of Gregory Flaxman)

The digital as we understand it today is incompatible with the concept of aesthetic experience. Numerous scholars have identified this incompatibility as the primary conceptual problem that must be addressed by the theory of digital aesthetics. “The Page in the Screen” provides a solution to this problem in the form of a reconceptualization of the digital image. The dissertation begins with a reading of Deleuze’s The Time-Image that culminates in a reimagining of the digital image as an information-graphical image. I provide a historical account that shows how this digital-qua-infographic image transformed the moving images that we interact with on a daily basis. Infographics had a small and circumscribed place in the visual architecture of pre-war screens; they began to completely restructure the screen in the 1940s, beginning with the infographic innovations of the first television news broadcasts. The fact that television played such a large role in the proliferation of infographics underscores one of the major contentions of my theory of the digital image, which is that this image is a digital technology in its own right and not reducible to the phenomenal manifestation of digital processes carried out by computers. Finally, I present a theory of the infographic image based in the writings of C.S. Peirce and Jacques Bertin in order to show that the infographic image and the moving image have incongruous ways of organizing time and space. This incongruity results in a paradox when the two images become integrated in the digital age. In the end, I argue that this paradox is the site where the digital and the aesthetic interface with one another.

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To Larry and Pat Watson and Nadine Gravitt

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to express my deep and sincere appreciation to the members of my dissertation committee: Florence Dore, Gregory Flaxman, Mark B.N. Hansen, Matthew Taylor, Henry

Veggian and Rick Warner. Their mentorship and guidance have been invaluable to my development as a scholar.

I would like to thank my family for all of their support over the years. I owe particular gratitude to my parents, Alan and Phyllis Watson, and also my grandparents, to whom this

dissertation is dedicated. By giving me the opportunity to pursue my goals, they have made all of

this work possible.

Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Rae X. Yan, the most dedicated teacher and ethical scholar I have known. I am thankful every day for her generosity, constructive criticism, and emotional support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE: A MEDITATION ON 24 FRAMES AND THE DIGITAL SCREEN ...... 1

INTRODUCTION ...... 7

The Problem of Digital Aesthetics ...... 8

Digital/Graphical Aesthesis and the Materiality of the Image ...... 17

Chapter Synopses ...... 21

Assembling the Digital from The Time-Image ...... 26

CHAPTER 1: TAXONOMIES OF THE NUMERICAL IMAGE ...... 28

Just an Image ...... 28

Cybernetique: Specters of Control ...... 35

Informatique: Regime of Order-Words...... 39

Télé / Vidéo: A Historical Digression...... 44

Électronique: Cinema of the Circuit ...... 48

Numérique: The Digital/Graphical ...... 50

Digital Aesthetics and Beginning Again ...... 53

CHAPTER 2: GENEALOGIES OF THE DIGITAL SCREEN ...... 57

The Page-Like Screen ...... 57

Infographic Cinema ...... 61

Infographic Television ...... 66

Television News: The First Fully Infographic Genre ...... 71

CBS News, 1941-1949 ...... 74

Visualization: How Information Restructures Screen Space ...... 80

Infographic Space and the “Piano Nobile” of Digital Information ...... 84

CHAPTER 3: SEMIOTICS OF GRAPHIC SPACE ...... 89

Immovable Object ...... 89

A Brief History of the Infographic ...... 93

First Formalization of Graphic Space ...... 96

Infographic Semiology ...... 101

Cinematographic Time and Cinematic Logic ...... 106

Conclusion: From One Screen to Another ...... 110

CODA: THE ABSTRACT LINE AND THE DIAGRAM ...... 118

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PREFACE: A MEDITATION ON 24 FRAMES AND THE DIGITAL SCREEN

Abbas Kiarostami’s 24 Frames begins with a static shot of Brueghel the Elder’s Hunters in the Snow. In the bucolic moment captured by the painting, the hunters and their dogs trudge across a snow-covered hillside overlooking a scene of village life below. The screen simply frames the painting at first, and then gradually, moving elements begin to appear within the frozen, painted space. Wisps of smoke escape from the chimney of a house. A photorealistic dog wanders idly through the foreground. As movement enters the frame, the painting becomes a layered space; between the points of distance simulated by the painting’s perspectival technique, filmic spaces are interposed. Painted surfaces that remain flat and motionless are suddenly intersected by digitally filmed and composited footage of birds and livestock. Through an uncanny and awkward collage of painted and filmed visual elements, a movement unfolds that seems entangled with both the moment of the painting’s narrative content and the moment of its creation. The ethereal smoke, the seemingly aimless movements of the animals, and the murmuring ambient noises that provide a soundscape to the shot all evoke the moment just before this scene became fixed in time. These cinematic traces of human and animal life that enter the frame don’t replace or seamlessly blend with the painting, but instead surround and fill it with the signs of a more nebulous and flowing material from which the painting distills and fixes its image. The shot remains framed on the painting throughout, so that it always fills the screen. There is no visible end or outside to the painted space, only the traces of a more weightless and anchorless image flowing through it.

This is the first of the 24 titular “frames”: 4.5-minute shots, most of which take the form

of digitally-animated photographs or meticulously arranged and composed nature scenes. Each frame is separated from the one that precedes it by a black screen and a white-text intertitle that

lists the number of the frame that comes next. Very few humans appear in the frames; most

depict landscapes and seascapes populated by various animals, including birds, rodents, wolves,

deer, and cattle. The animals interact sometimes purposefully, sometimes inscrutably, as they

traverse the frame, while snow, rain, clouds, dust and waves provide more ambient, drifting

patterns of motion. The frames make extensive use of digital animation and digital compositing

to produce a paradoxical temporality: a sense of moments frozen and unfrozen in time. They are

equal parts photographs come to life and pieces of time trapped in the orbit of a stationary

instant. In one of the only frames to contain human figures, a group of tourists stand gazing at the

Eiffel tower, suspended in a photographic pose, while pedestrians hurry past on the sidewalk,

oblivious as they tramp distractedly through the stillness of the photographic space. The

sidewalk, as the point of connection between the moving and still figures, functions as one space

that belongs to two worlds simultaneously. As an extended formal experiment, 24 Frames is

constantly producing spaces like this: caught between different media, disparate temporalities,

and mixed compositional logics.

In many frames, the space of the image is broken into unequal parts by the sometimes

monochromatic, sometimes two-dimensional silhouettes that occupy the foreground. One

characteristic frame contains a view of the ocean, filmed in color, behind a monochromatic iron

fence. Silhouetted birds perch and hop atop the fence posts. The upper rail of the fence cuts

through the frame, drawing a heavy black line across the screen’s surface. In the landscape

frames, animals sometimes appear to cross an invisible boundary as they pass between layers of

separated space; in one frame, wolves make their way down a snow-covered hillside to feed on a carcass. Their legs glide over the unbroken white surface of the snow with strange, disconnected movements as they pass from midground to foreground. The visible and invisible barriers that seem to divide the frames internally create the sense of disparate, simultaneous scene within a single frame. In the scene of the feeding wolves, the snowbank that separates a tree at the center of the frame from the carcass at the bottom right is so blank and unnaturally white that the two fragments of space appear completely dissociated, as though they could be two separate moments in time.

24 Frames’ unique sense of space, time, and movement derives in part from the fixity of the camera, which almost never moves. Together with the complete lack of traditional montage, the motionless camera allows the frames to operate as living tableaus, drawing obvious comparisons to some of the very earliest works of cinema, like Georges Méliès’ impossible

“trick” movements and painted backdrops or J. Stuart Blackton’s stop-motion easel drawings.

The frames recall early cinema-work in the way that they produce their effects within the static shot; the visible cut, the juxtaposition of shots in a sequence, and the mobile camera are abandoned primarily in favor of effects of temporal difference and spatial fragmentation within the frame. One of the few mobile shots in 24 Frames depicts a horse running alongside a car.

Even here, the camera’s perspective remains fixed within a frame, formed by the window of the car, while the car creates the tracking motion of the shot. The galloping horse captured in profile is reminiscent of Eadweard Muybridge’s well-known 1878 chronophotographic study of a horse in motion: one of several allusions through which 24 Frames calls attention to its formal kinship with proto-cinema; like Muybridge’s work, the frames also constitute an experiment in search of a new kind of image. Kiarostami invites the comparison by making the shot dimly lit and low

contrast compared to the other 23 frames, giving the impression of an older, lower-definition medium.

Yet the allusion is made in passing, as the image transforms itself again and again into something else. The low-contrast effect is actually created by the car’s tinted window; the viewer doesn’t know this until the window abruptly rolls down to reveal a much brighter snowscape. What appeared to be the medium of the shot is revealed as a filter interposed between the subject and another medium. As the window rolls down, the top of the glass in the lower part of the frame creates another one of 24 Frames many lower third borders. Frames like this one are constantly refracted and segmented by internal frames, media, screens, filters and borders. In another frame, the screen is dominated by a shaded French door. A bird outside the door casts a shadow on the fabric of the door shade. The unshaded lower third of the screen reveals a rectangle of lawn brightly lit by the sun. It is as though the camera is always looking through the shot into another shot, through a filtering or masking layer into another layer, so that the movement of figures within the frames is always taking place between overlapping layers of space and time.

24 Frames is aesthetically invested in a complex interplay between film and photography—between static, captured moments and ephemeral scenes of life and movement.

However, this dichotomy is complicated by the presence of two other media practices: painting and digital compositing. In the final frame, a woman sleeps at her desk in front of a large, second-story bay window. Outside, the wind animates the trunks and branches of a stand of pine trees. The center-point of the shot is a computer monitor, on which the last shot of William

Wyler’s The Best Years of our Lives is slowly rendering in the control window of an editing software program. The program interface features a monitoring panel flanked by control panels,

menus and a toolbar, and bordered beneath by a timeline feature. The computer screen within the

frame specularizes the digital processes through which the film achieves most of its effects. At

the same time, the timeline occupying the lower third of the program window echoes the form

and position of the fences, walls, and other boundary-forming objects seen in the earlier frames.

The computer window is both an image of the workspace that produced the frames and another frame in itself.

The painter’s canvas and the digital editing bay are the two media spaces that bookend the film, providing a frame for 24 Frames. But what connects these two media practices? Both involve a manual control over the material at the level of the mark; anything can be drawn into the frame, added or taken away, down to a single pixel. Painting must produce perspectival and temporal effects that are, at least in principal, automatic in film and photography. Through digital compositing and digital animation, Kiarostami’s frames also construct their own space and time within the fixed boundaries of the shot. The lines of the frame connect and separate spaces in a manner that mirrors the space of digital composition. That space is the computer screen, which is already a space of mixed media and altered temporalities.

Unlike painting, Kiarostami’s frames alter and interact with a specifically cinematic temporality. The final shot tracks into the digital screen to focus its attention on an image from the cinema; it lingers on the end titles of The Best Years of Our Lives as they plays out in slow-

motion from within the graphic interface of the program window. Yet describing 24 Frames as a film feels inaccurate. Rather, it is a digital, formal experiment that asks questions about the relationship between digital, graphic, photographic and cinematic works of art. The digital and cinematic elements of the work serve to animate the painted and photographed elements. The digital and graphic elements break down and restructure the photographic and cinematic. The

time and space of the digital screen attaches itself to the time and space of the cinematic image in

a manner that results in formal modulations neither medium could achieve on its own.

In the end, the film leaves us to contemplate the screen as a transformed space: a space

still inhabited and circumscribed by the cinematic image but no longer defined by it. Between the

digital and the cinematic image, the still and the moving image, the drawn and the captured

image, the screen provides points of contact. There is no leveling of the image, however, as 24

Frames demonstrates. The images retain their specificity, their incongruity, even as the physical

substrate of the medium disappears. The most accurate designation for 24 Frames is perhaps a

screen work: a work that engages with the screen’s unique capacity for rewriting formal codes

and orchestrating confrontations between heterogeneous media practices.

The dissertation that follows is an attempt to theorize the space of the digital screen and

provide an argument for why it still matters as a space for aesthetic consideration. It suggests

some new ways of thinking about the screen and its relationship to digital and cinematic images

in an attempt to lays the groundwork for a future theory of digital screen aesthetics. My theorization of the screen is intended to serve as a corrective to the current trajectory of digital aesthetics, which needs a return to the screen, I argue, in order to circumvent a logic of the digital image that resists the aesthetic. Before arriving at such a theory, my first task is to confront the history of the screen after the arrival of digital media. Though this history will carry

the discussion far afield from works of screen art like Kiarostami’s, my aim is to arrive at a

perspective from which screen works like 24 Frames can be better understood.

THE PAGE AND THE SCREEN: VISUALIZED INFORMATION AND THE AESTHETICS OF THE DIGITAL IMAGE INTRODUCTION

The new images no longer have any outside (out-of-field), any more than they are internalized in a whole; rather, they have a right side and a reverse.... They are the object of a perpetual reorganization, in which a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image. The organization of space here loses its privileged directions, and first of all the privilege of the vertical which the position of the screen still displays, in favour of an omni-directional space which constantly varies its angles and co-ordinates, to exchange the vertical and the horizontal. And the screen itself, even if it keeps a vertical position by convention, no longer seems to refer to the human posture, like a window or a painting, but rather constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed 'data', information replacing nature, and the brain-city, the third eye, replacing the eyes of nature.

-Gilles Deleuze1

And now, at the end of the twentieth century, with the pressure of modern information and the advances of data processing, graphics is passing through a new and fundamental stage. The great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image, and the graphics of tomorrow, is the disappearance of the congential fixity of the image. When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the 'illustration,' to the living image, the widely accessible research instrument it is now becoming. The graphic is no longer only the 'representation' of a final simplification, it is a point of departure for the discovery of these simplifications and the means for their justification. The graphic has become, by its manageability, an instrument for information processing.

-Jacques Bertin2

I. The Problem of Digital Aesthetics

Over the past several years, a growing number of media scholars have turned to the

discourse of aesthetics in search of new ways of conceptualizing the limitations and productive

capacities of digital and computational media. The need for a new aesthetics as a way of

understanding our digital present has been a motivating concern in works such as Patrick

Jagoda’s Network Aesthetics (2016), Alexander R. Galloway’s 2018-19 “Uncomputable” lecture

series, and Beatrice Fazi’s “Digital Aesthetics: The Discrete and the Continuous” (2019). This

recent aesthetic turn is also a conceptual turn; the questions scholars are now posing in regard to

digital aesthetics deal directly with the concept of the digital, rather than with the assortment of

technologies and interactions that have been termed “digital” in ordinary language. The recent

work therefore represents a different approach to thinking the digital than, for example, Sean

Cubitt’s Digital Aesthetics (1998), which presents a version of the digital that includes all kinds

of interactions between humans and computational machines, from hacking to biotechnology.

The advantage of such a bottom-up approach is that it allows the object of study to guide the

critical discourse that addresses it, avoiding the pitfalls of an empty prescriptivism. The

disadvantage is that it potentially leaves us in a position of conceptual paralysis, unable to

articulate what makes certain objects or interactions digital and others not. Perhaps worse, it risks

misconstruing the “digital” in the digital object altogether by unconsciously conforming it to the

rubric of another class of object. To address these shortcomings, recent scholarship has called for

a turn from thinking in terms of nominally digital objects to the question of what constitutes the digital conceptually.

In this vein, Meredith Hoy’s From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics

(2017) calls for a new aesthetic vocabulary to account for the fact that the visual forms of digital

works differ fundamentally from their analog counterparts. Moreover, she argues that the history of art has privileged the analog over the digital for centuries. By habitually lauding works for being ambiguous, dense or overflowing with meaning, we have created a hierarchy that Hoy believes will always favor the analog and exclude the digital. This hierarchy informs not only aesthetic criticism but also how we interact with digital media on an everyday basis, as for instance when the density of pixilation that allows a digital image to simulate the continuity of natural perception is coded as better than one in which the pixels remain visible. If density is an analog aesthetic value, then an uncritical preference for denser, more naturalistic digital images constitutes a failure to appreciate the digital on its own terms. If the aesthetic categories and preferences we inherit are already analog, then the digital work can only be conceptualized as an inferior analog work.

Hoy’s perspective belongs to the conceptual turn I am describing in that it proceeds from an interest in conceptualizing precisely what defines the digital in contradistinction to other categories. To address the specificity of the digital, Hoy proposes three contrasting aesthetic categories: analog, digital and computational. The digital aesthetic category depends upon the use of “discrete, discontinuous, and interchangeable units” to construct the work (210). These digital units must be part of the work at the moment of its reception, excluding works that are produced by digital means but lack the perceptible digital unit in their final state. Hoy’s digital aesthetic is therefore divorced from any specific technological associations. In this sense, the conceptual turn can also serve as a corrective to a narrowly presentist view of the digital that might results from a bottom-up aesthetic analysis of digitally produced objects. In fact, Hoy’s conceptual approach exemplifies the polar opposite approach to the pervasive, technologically- inflected approach to the digital such as one encounters in D.N. Rodowick The Virtual Life of

Film (2007). For Rodowick, the digital is entirely a matter of process, and whether the process is perceptible or imperceptible in the resulting image is a matter of indifference:

Scanning an image or capturing a digital ‘photograph’ requires sampling light in a given

frequency in the form of a grid with horizontal and vertical axes. The form of the grid is

necessary to produce mathematically discrete units (pixels) whose variables can be

assigned numerical values (luminance, color, etc.). It is significant that we want to call

such captured elements information, for inputs to digital devices level every source

(speech, music, text, image) to a common form: symbolic notation. Once scanned, an

artifact can never be truly returned to a state of nondiscreteness. The process of

quantification or numerization is irreversible, which is another way of saying that inputs

and outputs are discontinuous in digital information. Moreover, these discontinuities

produce perceptual or aesthetic effects. Given enough resolution, a digital photograph can

simulate the look of a continuously produced analogical image, but the pixel grid remains

in the logical structure of the image. (119)

This ontological characterization of the digital results in a digital aesthetic object that can only be interpreted in virtue of the history of its production. The “structure” of the digital may be coded into the image in some fundamental way, but nothing about its appearance testifies to this deep structure. Hoy’s dissatisfaction with such an approach stems from the fact that it leaves us with no means of distinguishing between objects which bear the mark of the digital in a perceptible way and objects which do not. Further, it fails to account for other methods of producing an image out of discrete units, such as the painterly practice of pointillism, which arguably constitutes a digital technology operating outside of the photographic/electronic machinery

Rodowick envisions.

At the same time, Hoy’s approach raises a new conceptual problem with regard to categorization: how can we account for the fact that the digital objects we encounter today seem so different than the objects of the past if the digitality of both are defined in the same terms?

Does the conceptual turn in digital aesthetics risk erasing the differences that make the present day digital unique? For Hoy, the answer seems to lie with her third category—computational aesthetics—which is proposed as an aesthetics pertaining to objects produced by computational means. By thus separating the digital from the computational, Hoy recovers the ability to speak to the specificity of art in the age of computers; but in doing so, she creates yet another conceptual problem. Her critique of definitions of digital aesthetics that focus exclusively on the means of producing the work now applies to her own sense of the computational. As Kate

Mondloch points out in her review of From Point to Pixel, Hoy’s argument that digital aesthetics must operate on the basis of a digitality that is perceived in the work rather than a digital process of creation is undermined by her proposal of a computational aesthetics based on the very same process (168). Furthermore, the computational is ostensibly identical with Rodowick’s sense of the digital, which results in an object perceptually indistinguishable from the objects of analog aesthetics. In order to avoid this self-defeating deadlock, the new digital aesthetics must find a way to distinguish between the contemporary and the conceptual digital—the digital as we know it in the present and the digital as a broad, conceptual category–without resorting to ways of thinking that relegate the digital back into the domain of analog aesthetics.

Hoy’s version of the problem of digital aesthetics is historical: the digital/analog distinction is preceded by a history of aesthetic reception that clearly values the qualities of the former over the qualities of the latter. The issues that present themselves in Hoy’s categorical schema point to another problem of digital aesthetics that is conceptual: there are at least two

ways of defining the digital in the context of aesthetic discourses, neither of which are

compatible with analog aesthetics, and neither of which are independently sufficient to express

what makes a work digital in the contemporary sense of the term. On the one hand, there is a

pressing need for something like Hoy’s concept of the discrete unit as the perceptible mark of the

digital in order to counterbalance a digital-as-technological-process perspective that yields no adequate language to talk about the specificity of the digital image. As Mondloch remarks, “the

current models for considering digital art in many cases have failed to provide a robust or

meaningful aesthetic vocabulary unique to the digital.” (169). On the other hand, the notion that

digital machines and media haven’t fundamentally changed the world in the past century is

implausible. While concepts like Hoy’s digital aesthetics enable us to appreciate and talk about

the digital in a long historical sense, they do so at the expense of our ability to articulate the

specificity of the digital present. Rather than simply re-categorizing the objects of aesthetic

discourse, the conceptual dilemma of digital aesthetics requires a critical inquiry into whether, or

in what sense, an aesthetics of contemporary digital production is even conceivable.

We can begin to trace the conceptual terrain of this problem by examining the particular

definitions of digital and aesthetic that have gained the most traction in recent scholarly debates.

Aesthetics, takes its name from aísthēsis: the experience of sensation. In the contemporary

context of the digital aesthetics debate, the term retains an association with aísthēsis as its core

principle. In Cubitt’s “Aesthetics of the Digital” (2016), he gives a historical overview of the

development of aesthetics as the term took on more varied meanings over the course of several

centuries:

Straying from its ancient Greek root meaning ‘“sensation,” the term “aesthetic” has had

to bear an increasingly heavy load since becoming current in Europe in the 18th century.

Attached variously to the physical or phenomenal sensations of the body as it senses the

world; the natural or artificial objects that give rise to such sensations (especially

pleasurable ones); the specific qualities of beautiful objects, and the emotional and

intellectual reactions we have to those objects and sensations, aesthetics has come to

attach itself to the realm of art. (265)

Over time, the language of aesthetics expanded to include terms like intensity, intuition, quality and percept. In describing aesthetic experience, we might speak of sublimity or of the continuity of object and perception. In the classical mode of describing the beautiful, aesthetics often

evokes encounters with the indescribable and the irreducible. In other modes of aesthetic

discourse, we might see the function of art as to introduce new experiential possibilities into the

world, to provoke thought, or to have a transformative effect upon the viewer. Contrastingly, the

conceptual digital one encounters in these debates is one rooted in the etymologies and

operational definitions of the word itself. Digital derives from digitus, which refers to the fingers

of the hand, or more recently, to the domain of whole numbers (digits). In mathematical terms,

the digital is a rational discrete process. Rationality is the property of being expressible as the

fraction or quotient of two integers. All integers and countable numbers are rational, but the vast

majority of real numbers are irrational. Irrational numbers, like , are uncountable because they do not terminate and do not repeat. Digital values exclude such 𝜋𝜋in-between values, producing a regularity that is ideal for creating codes. In opposition to the digital, the term analog has come to refer to a continuum of variation. This opposition originates in discussions of media, in which the analog media work by recording “analogous” impressions of the variation in light, sound or other sources of energy that serves as their input, while the digital media turn this input into a numerical code.

Beatrice Fazi’s approach to the problem of digital aesthetics proceeds from an

understanding of the digital and the analog that positions discreteness against the continuum.

“Aesthetics pertains to sensuous experiencing,” she writes, “to properties, features and qualities

that rely on the continuity of perceptual and sensuous relations. Conversely, the digital is a data

technology that uses discrete (that is, discontinuous) values to represent, store and manage

information” (4). From Kant to Deleuze, Beatrice Fazi suggests that the major themes of aesthetics we read about in the western philosophical tradition are resolutely analog; they deal with the continuum of experience rather than the discreteness of numbering and counting.

Significantly, the aesthetic retains the sense of a temporal category through its persistent association with aísthēsis. Cubitt describes the aesthetic in temporal terms as “a moment when

objects and senses come into contact—generating forms, sensations, and psychic events” (265).

Likewise, in Time and the Digital: Connecting Technology, Aesthetics, and a Process

Philosophy of Time (2012), Timothy Barker describes aesthetics as “a process, which involves

not only sensing objects but enacting sensory processes, involving ourselves, in every sense of

the word, in these processes through interacting with the world” (134). In all of these works, the

aesthetic is figured as that which returns us to the continuum and flux of lived experience from

the deadening order of habit. In a sense, the digital is not so much a problem for aesthetics as it is

the problem of aesthetics.

It is precisely this constitutive incompatibility between digitization and aesthesis that

Claire Colebrook evokes in the preface to Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital when she

remarks that “all problems of aesthetics are problems of the digital” (ix). Aligning the digital

with the innate repeatability and codability of form, Colebrook poses a series of questions that

generalize the problem of digital aesthetics into a philosophical problem at the heart of all

aesthetic experience:

How is it that what is received or given to the senses is experienced as this or that

identifiable form? How does sensation in its temporal complexity and openness take on a

body that can be repeated, circulated, copied, and simulated? How is the fluidity and

temporal richness of intuition organized into distinction? How does the flux of sensation

become a world of determined, repeatable, ordered, and synthesized objects? (ix)

For Colebrook, the answer to these questions lies in a Deleuzian conceptualization of aesthetic practice as a process unfolding between the two incommensurable domains of the digital and the analog. She sees the digital as the unavoidable result of any process that imposes a form on the flux of sensation. The aesthetic process then operates by reversing this “transition from an analog intensity of infinitely small distances to a discrete series of digits” (xxix). “For Deleuze,”

Colebrook writes, “the aim of all art is a retrieval of an analog language, a way of thinking beyond the digit: beyond the units that the counting and measuring hand (aligned with the reckoning eye) have used to determine the world” (xii). Colebrook interprets this Deleuzian aesthetics of retrieval as depending upon an interplay between the ordered digital and the formless analog:

For Deleuze the digital has always been at the heart of aesthetics, both aesthetics as the

sense of art and aesthetics as ‘aesthesis’ or what it is to pass from sensation to sense. At

the same time, and alongside this passage towards sense and ideality, organic life must

also partake in a necessary destruction or disorganization; if the organism were to remain

within itself in complete integrity it would be without world and without life. Some

openness to what is not determined in advance allows for an influx of the not yet formed,

enabling an ongoing synthesis. (xxv)

The problem of digital aesthetics in Colebrook’s account thus links the struggle to create works

of art with the process through which life sustains itself. Rather than requiring its own aesthetic

concepts, the digital becomes the crux of all aesthetics on this view, but the level of

philosophical abstraction required to think the digital in these terms leaves the question of the

specificity of the contemporary digital moment completely obscured.

Colebrook’s study of Blake belongs to a body of recent work that seeks the solution to

the problem of digital aesthetics through specifically Deleuzian concepts: an endeavor Fazi

classifies in terms of the effort to construct a “digital Deleuze.” In the context contemporary

digital media studies, the digital Deleuze is often figured as a continuation of the two-volume

Cinema project: an attempt to extrapolate from the powerful concepts Deleuze developed in thinking with the cinema to produce an adjoining set of concepts for thinking with the contemporary digital mediascape. Such efforts have been persistent over the past two decades, but continually struggle against the apparent ambivalence or even disdain for the digital one encounters in Deleuze’s writings. Timothy Murray’s “Time @ Cinema’s Future: New Media Art and the Thought of Temporality” (2009) discusses the irony that Deleuze, who expresses distinctively combative and suspicious attitudes toward “the new images” at the end of The

Time-Image, should become “the philosopher with whom so many artists and theorists frequently dialogue to articulate notions of a ‘philosophy after the new media.’” (355). Beyond the question of whether Deleuze personally believed in the aesthetic potential of the digital, there is the more critical issue of whether digital media can even be reconciled with Deleuze’s conceptual framework to begin with. In “False Movements: Or, What Counts as Cinema for Deleuze?”

(2014), Nico Baumbach calls attention to the apparent incompatibility between Deleuze’s

“schema that requires cinema to consist of blocks of movement and time” and the appearance in

the digital age of an image “increasingly defined by postproduction and the logic of informatics”

(265). “Deleuze himself feared as much,” Baumbach writes, “hinting at the dangers of an image

in the age of control that became restricted to ‘professional training of the eye’” (265). Indeed,

the rational discrete units into which the digital process carves the image are inimical to the

irrational cuts of the cinema, which Barker describes as “cutting the shot midstream, failing to

link one image with its counterpart in a chronological temporal sequence,” such that “the actual

image links, or extends, to its virtual counterpart as it links to that which is not seen, that which

is out-of-field” (121). If an aesthetics of the contemporary digital image based on Deleuze is conceivable, it will have to somehow account for these discrepancies, as Colebrook has already attempted to do with a more ageless and ahistorical concept of the digital.

II. Digital/Graphical Aesthesis and the Materiality of the Image

As these examples demonstrate, scholars of the recent aesthetic turn have misconstrued

the relationship between the digital and aesthetics in two primary ways. In some cases, as Fazi

and Hoy point out, they fail to address the conceptual specificity of the digital by seeking to

bring an external sense or tradition of aesthetics to the digital. In other cases, they seek a new

sense of the aesthetic within the digital with misplaced optimism. This is the downfall of most of

the efforts towards constructing a digital Deleuze: a subject that will be addressed more

extensively in chapter one. Broadly construed, the problem in these cases is that the digital

viewed from a Deleuzian frame of reference is inherently unaesthetic. As Fazi and Colebrook

recognize, there is a mutually excluding relationship between the rational discrete and the

irrational continuum. Yet rather than retreat to an aesthetics predicated on the valuation of the

analog, or re-characterize the digital in a way that ignores its conceptual and etymological

history, I argue that digital aesthetics must be sought in this very mutual exclusivity. As

Colebrook suggests, there is a constitutive relationship between the aesthetic and the unaesthetic

that plays out through processes of formalization and deformation. If there is an aesthetics proper

to the contemporary digital, it must exist at the points of deformation, where the digital comes

into contact with other logics, other processes, or other images. In the present moment, the logic

of the digital understood in terms of the rational discrete coding of reality is pervasive and

totalizing. It provides the conditions for new aesthetic practices that must nevertheless come

from the outside, from the irrational that deforms the logic of the digital. Rather than separating

digital aesthetics from other aesthetic categories, an aesthetics of the contemporary digital age

must look for the new points of friction that make the interplay of categories in the digital

present distinct from other moments in its history.

My account of contemporary digital aesthetics depends upon an explicit, tripartite

distinction between “the digital image,” “the digital age,” and “the digital screen.” Going

forward, I will use the digital age to refer to our present condition, in which the rational discrete

occupies a special place of power, reigning over our technologies, ways of thinking and forms of

life. The digital age is where we might locate the data technologies referenced in Fazi’s

definition. Following Colebrook, I take up a broader and more etymologically-motivated definition of the digital, which allows us to shed the sense of the digital as somehow definitively tied to computing machines. Though digitalism does indeed hold a privileged place with regard to computation, we can nevertheless encounter the digital anywhere that “the one becomes two,” to borrow Alexander Galloway’s terms (Laruelle 52). The digital age repeats and intensifies the

problem of the digital, as data technologies interrupt aesthesis in two ways: by making content predictable and intelligible (the basis of encoding) and by reducing the components of an input source to a set of discrete alternatives/selections (the mechanism of decoding). If the digital age thus places us within conditions of existence that are inimical to experience, sensation and the aesthetic as we know it, then we must seek a new way of understanding aesthetics which could be commensurate with the digital and capable of resisting it.

One of my primary concerns in this dissertation will be to define the digital image as a mediating factor between the digital and the digital age. Going by the broader and more conceptually sound definition of the digital, one feels tempted to conclude that the digital is nothing new. Yet there is resolutely something distinctive about the digital age which throws into relief the problem of digital aesthetics. This disjunction is where I turn to Deleuze to develop my concept of the digital image as something distinct from either the digital or the digital age. One of the problems with how we address questions of the digital in the digital age could be described in terms of a binarism that separates phenomena from material. Matthew

Kirschenbaum and others have critiqued the predilection towards the phenomenal in digital scholarship that focuses on screen content and other apparitional things that computational media present to consumers as the end products of a digital process. A logical solution might be to make up for this bias by pivoting to the other polarity and focusing on the processes behind the screen. I would seek instead to address both through the generality of the non-phenomenological image. My sense of a non-phenomenal image here follows from Deleuze’s reading of Bergson.

In Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory, the image first appears as something more akin to

Leibniz’s monad than Kant’s phenomenon. Instead of beginning from human perception and naturalizing it, Bergson begins with the idea of matter perceiving itself and calls this the image.

Along these lines, Deleuze in The Movement-Image describes the image as both a material and a process: a “flowing-matter” (59). We can classify such images by their functions—how they act on and are acted upon by other images—and by the abstract machines that produce them. I contend that the concepts that dominate contemporary thinking about digital aesthetics— embodiment, networks, virtuality, etc.—can be better understood within the more capacious conceptual framework, originating from Deleuze’s reading of Bergson, of the material- processional nature of images. I use the material-processional category of the image as a conceptual probe to seek out the commonalities between the matters, contents, forms and techniques of the digital age, to investigate what abstract functions are determining our digital- age experience. In this way, my concept of the digital image begins by placing the screen on the same plane as the computational process, rather than after it. From there, it finds a vantage point from which the digital screen appears not as the outcome of digital processes but as a point of intersection between disparate histories—of the computer, of the cinema, etc.—and a point of conflict and contestation between incompatible forms of the image: digital, movement, time, etc.

In this sense, I want to argue for the importance of the screen as a site for negotiating questions of digital aesthetics, against the critiques launched by some other materialist and process- oriented digital scholarship, if only by revoking the phenomenal status which is the basis of the screen being contrasted with materialism in the first instance.

The digital image is the formed-content of the digital replicating itself across numerous domains—technology, social life, academic research—in a movement of proliferation that constitutes the digital age. The digital image is also where digitalism “interfaces” with aesthetics.

My primary contention in this dissertation is that the problem of digital aesthetics must be framed in terms of the digital image as opposed to the digital object (or artifact, system, etc.). As

my argument unfolds, the point of reference for the particularity of the digital image becomes,

specifically, the graphical image as the original instance of the digital image in art. Here, I am

following Colebrook and other scholars who have sought early instances of the problem of

digital aesthetics in the forms traced by the human hand: the tendency of the digital line (i.e., the

graphical line) to separate one into two, divide figure from ground, absence from presence, etc.

The problem of digital aesthetics must first be understood in the context of the innate digitalism

of graphics. Further, the most significant metaphysical transformation pertaining to graphics in

the twentieth century has to do not with the computer per se, but with the screen. The graphic

space of the page provides the original, necessary and stable conditions for digitalism. The

digital is uprooted, unsettled and disfigured beyond repair by the arrival of the digital screen.

While the digital image is a stultifying form, the digital screen is a node of contact between the

digital image and the moving image. This space of conflict and contestation is a new space,

unique to the digital age, where productive aesthetic experiments that interface with the digital

are possible. Digital aesthetics becomes possible only in virtue of the semiotic destabilization of

the digital/graphical image enacted by the screen, where the discrete in its most potent form is

once again confronted by the continuum.

III. Chapter Synopses

This argument consists of three movements, staged over three chapters: Taxonomies of the Numerical Image, Genealogies of the Digital Screen, and Semiotics of Graphic Space.

Taxonomies of the Numerical Image

The first chapter consists of a close-grained analysis of the concept of the digital image that takes shape in the last chapter of The Time-Image. Contemporary scholarship has consistently posed the question of digital aesthetics in the context of an attempt to construct a

“Digital Deleuze”: an extrapolation of Deleuzian thought into the arena of digital-age media theory. The Cinema books have been overlooked in this discussion in favor of other texts from

Deleuze’s oeuvre, especially “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Foucault, and the Felix

Guattari collaborations. While they form an integral component to Deleuze’s digitally-applicable

thought, what these texts lack is a discussion of the digital-qua-image such as would allow us to merge the political and aesthetic dimensions of this thought into a cohesive whole. What emerges from my reading is an entirely new perspective on the historical and present day digital image as fundamentally connected to the expression of informatic processes in non-physical, graphical space. No one, including perhaps Deleuze himself, has made the connection that

Deleuze’s descriptions of the digital screen image also describe, in every respect and detail, the features of information graphics on the page. The question of the digital then becomes linked to questions of graphical expression, and how the graphic becomes, in the 20th century, our

fundamental way of organizing and interacting with information. This understanding of the

digital image illuminates the ways in which all digital matter-processes can be conceptualized as

forms of graphical information. For example, electronic circuits are the fundamental building-

block of the machines that drive our networked society. An electronic circuit is also its own

diagram; circuits are literally infographics drawn in lines of conductive material that graphically

describe their own function in terms of a network of drawn and plotted pathways, divergences

and sources of resistance, for currents to traverse. In this sense, the infographic gives us the form

of the digital/graphical as the abstract image that proliferates through every area of life in the

digital age. The digital image as infographically defined becomes a way of understanding digital

age processes that span the phenomenal-material divide. Moreover, turning to graphics allows us

to confront the problem of digital aesthetics in its most abstract form, as a problem concerning

the image as such. The presupposed unity of the digital image and the screen is interrupted as a

consequence of this reading; we can no longer assume that digital images belong on screens and instead must address the pressing question of what becomes of the infographic page when it colonizes the space of the screen, and in doing so, potentially comes into confrontation with the

space and temporality of the cinematic image.

Genealogies of the Digital Screen

The second chapter gives a historical account of this confrontation, tracing the

development of screen infographics through cinema and computing, but focusing most of its

attention on television, wherein the generalized form of the graphic as a means of “digitizing”

(numerically encoding) visual space saw the most development. Since we can no longer look at

the digital image as something that innately resides on the screen, or as the inevitable outcome of

any digital process connected to a screen, we now must return to the beginning and find out

when and how the digital/graphical and screen image become intertwined. Perhaps

counterintuitively, the complex relationship between the digital image and the screen has more to

do with the history of television than the history of computational machines. Television is central

to the history of the digital image and screen that we must attend to in order to correct the

mistaken sense of digital aesthetics. This chapter makes concrete the theoretical claims of the first chapter while also beginning to explore some of the tensions and contradictions that define

the relationship between the graphic/digital image and the screen/movement image. It attempts to

pinpoint when infographics started to dominate our screens and what changed when this

occurred. As a history of infographics in cinema and television, this stage of my argument

functions as a continuation of my digital expansion of the cinema-philosophy of Deleuze. To

fully engage with the concept of the digital image that Cinema 2 allows us to develop requires

interpretive work inside and outside of the text, just as the Cinema books dwell simultaneously

within the domain of philosophy and outside of it; Cinema finds its concepts by narrating a

history of film that emphasizes a different set of pivotal moments than more familiar story-of-

film arcs might include. The rift between classical and modern cinema no longer has anything to

do with technical developments such as sound synchronization, which “never seemed

fundamental in cinema’s evolution” (Cinema 2 262), but follows instead a path of semiotic

development, from “kinostructures” to “chronogeneses” (263). In a parallel history that finds its

decisive moment roughly contemporaneous with the development of the time-image, I trace the infographic image’s transition from the page to the screen. From a prehistory in proto-cinematic time series, to a fully elaborated visual language in television news, the infographic screen image eventually expands in the age of graphic-computing such that all images begin to take on infographic qualities or function as though they belong to an infographic imaginary.

Semiotics of Graphic Space

Finally, the third chapter returns to the problem of digital aesthetics in light of the digital/graphical image and its complicated history with the screen. It theorizes the semiotics of graphic space by reading in the margins of two texts: C.S. Peirce’s unpublished “masterpiece”3

Existential Graphs and Jacques Bertin’s seminal work, Sémiologie Graphique. The former was

written around 1914 as an attempt to perfect formal logic by rewriting it as a non-linguistic,

spatio-iconic system. The latter was published in 1967 as an attempt to standardize infographic

representation in light of the recent innovation of graphic computing. Between these two

elaborations, one semiotic and one semiological, there exists a common effort to invent a graphic

system that can function as an autonomous thinking machine, capable of generating, rather than

merely representing, new information: a “fertile logic” for Peirce, a data-processing image for

Bertin. The key to the graphic’s functionality in both cases is its stasis: its ability to arrest all

time and interpretative ambiguity in an abstract and unchanging moment rationnel (Bertin).

Thinking with Bertin, Peirce, Bergson and Deleuze, this chapter explores the graphic/digital in

terms of its unique relationship with temporality. The graphic image realizes a space and a

cognition totally removed from life and matter; it “thinks” from the perspective of a vacuum in

which no virtuality can live and no time can resume. The chapter brings the dissertation full

circle, back to the language of the Cinema books, in finally proposing a Deleuzian-cinematic

interpretation of the digital/graphic image as total interval or absolute cut, operationally defined

by the formula: image minus movement. This formula should be taken to convey a more radical

stasis than the still image (painting, photograph, etc.), which in every case contains some indirect

reference or possibility of movement. The graphic screen is in tension with itself, and motion

graphics are philosophically unthinkable. The digital screen thus calls for new thought and new

art in the way that it poses an insurmountable challenge to our thinking. The space of a digital

aesthetics is the abyss between the cinema screen that gave rise to the movement image and the

graphic sheet configured as anti-movement by the inescapable logic of the rational moment. The chapter ends with the conclusion that the space of a truly vital digital aesthetic practice must be

the abyss between the cinema/post-cinema screen that gave rise to the moving image and the graphic sheet configured as anti-movement.

A brief coda that follows this chapter brings these theories of the infographic screen into conversation with Deleuze’s radical concept of the diagram. In his work on the diagram in the art-practice of Francis Bacon—based around a mistranslation of Bacon’s own term, “graph”—

Deleuze imagines the diagram as a means of undoing the original division into two carried out by the graphic line. By opposing the diagram to the graphic, I will ultimately consider whether the struggle to realize a digital aesthesis in static media and the opposition between the painterly, abstract line and the dividing graphic line hold the key to understanding the paradoxes of the digital screen.

IV. Assembling the Digital Image from The Time-Image

The text that provides the starting point and basis for all of my explorations of the digital image is The Time-Image. Though my digital image will differ from Deleuze’s in some respects, returning to his original mapping will allow me to reinterpret the function of the screen in relation to the digital in significant ways. For Deleuze, the new image is inextricably tied to the destiny of cinema in that it formally constitutes the next problematic that the cinematic arts will have to confront in order to maintain their relevance: namely, the computational automatism of the information society. Over the course of a few pages, Deleuze considers some of the features that differentiate this new kind of image from the cinema—features that exist in conjunction with new kinds of machines (cybernetic) and new distributions of power (networked). The content of cinema had already taken up these new conditions, but from the outside, through science-fiction narratives depicting control systems and non-human intelligences. The digital image, on the

other hand, corresponded directly to the non-discursive, visual formation of the computational—

something which cinema, at this stage, could merely represent (265). Ultimately, the passage

gives only a rough sketch of the new image—an abridged catalogue of its ambiguous

capabilities—before leaving us to contemplate whether this new, digital image should mark the

death of cinema, inspire its next phase, or become reflexive—paralleling the development of the

cinema—and embody a unique will-to-art in its own right (i.e., a digital-aesthetic becoming).

More than three decades after the time of Cinema 2’s composition, the confrontation between

cinema and the digital has had ample time to unfold, and during this interval, the influence of the

Cinema books on film and media studies has been extensive and lasting. Numerous attempts

have been made to put Deleuze’s cinema work in conversation with the digital media of the

present, yet the key questions remain unaddressed, including precisely where Deleuze’s

imagined digital image of 1985 stands in relation to the digital image as we envision it today.

The place of the digital within Cinema’s taxonomy of images thus constitutes a problem in two senses: an existential problem for cinema-art and a conceptual problem for cinema-philosophy.

Because it concerns the possibility of a digital will-to-art, it also coincides with my dissertations broader concern with the problem of digital aesthesis.

Ultimately, this dissertation takes up the unfinished thought about the digital that dangles from the end of The Time-Image and brings it to fruition. This contradiction at the heart of the digital screen provides the basis for a will-to-art that can oppose the oppressive power of all- encompassing digitalism. In the broadest sense, the work of the dissertation serves to provide a new way of thinking about the digital that will in turn open up new avenues to approach the far- reaching problem of digital aesthetics.

CHAPTER 1: TAXONOMIES OF THE NUMERICAL IMAGE

I claim new methods, and I am afraid that these methods may invalidate all will-to-art.

-Gilles Deleuze4

Introduction: Just an Image

At the end of The Time-Image, Gilles Deleuze provides a preliminary sketch for a

concept of the digital image. Often regarded as an afterthought to the more substantive cinema theory project that precedes it, the significance of this inchoate concept has never been properly investigated. This is not to suggest that Deleuze’s work has never been put in service of a project to theorize the digital; while 21st century media theory has seen numerous attempts at the

construction of such a “digital Deleuze,” these attempts generally focus on other texts and

conceptual frameworks from the philosopher’s oeuvre. In works such as the Guattari-coauthored

A Thousand Plateaus, one encounters methodologies and concepts that may better allow one to

approach the contemporary digital landscape. Conversely, the digital image addressed in the

Cinema books is not so readily assimilable. Instead, it speaks to us from the perspective of the

history of the moving image, in a manner that no longer resonates with contemporary digital

thought. Nevertheless, this unique digital image-concept makes it possible to productively

reassess the connection between the digital and the graphical: two domains which seem only

tangentially associated in a time when the digital is widely regarded as indifferent to content and

poorly understood by anyone seeking to approach it through mere screen phenomena. This chapter seeks to demonstrate that Deleuze’s conclusion proffers a unique opportunity to rethink the history of the digital image. I argue that Cinema 2 roots the digital image in the graphical, and that thinking through the revelation of digitalism as an effect conditioned by graphics creates entirely new avenues for approaching the problem of digital aesthetics. This ultimately permits us to envisage a “digital Deleuze” that is both more philosophically generative and truer to the spirit of the author’s body of work than any reading outside of Cinema 1 and 2 would allow.

Considerable effort has been directed by contemporary scholars towards bringing

Deleuze’s work into conversation with digital media theory. My undertaking here differs from most of these in terms of how they define their object of study and in some cases their methodology and critical orientation. Most engage with the digital in the context of digital practices, systems, technologies, or works. I will list a few representative examples here to give a sense of the breadth of approaches in recent scholarship. John Marks’s “Information and

Resistance: Deleuze, the Virtual and Cybernetics” (2006) typifies an approach concerned with the digital as it pertains to communication networks and computational operations. Timothy

Murray’s Digital Baroque (2008) broadly construes the digital to incorporate both the archival database and the circulatory network while also considering the aesthetics of interactivity and open-endedness in digital works of art and literature. Mark Poster and David Savat’s Deleuze and New Technology (2009) discusses digital technologies in terms of the politics of control and resistance that attend their uses and effects. Aden Evens’s “Digital Ontology and Example”

(2010) treats the digital in terms of binary codification, focusing on the digital’s essentially antagonistic relationship to materiality. Claire Colebrook’s Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the

Digital (2012) deals with the textual production and digitization of analogue works, where the

digital functions as a translation and codification of the analogue. Finally, Patricia Pisters’s The

Neuro-Image (2012) relates the digital screen to the neuroscientific model of the brain via the proliferating and nervous-system-like network of connected devices. Taken together, these

examples reflect how the course of digital media scholarship has carried it away from the image

as an object of concern, towards questions of production, reception, translation, interactivity,

materiality, power, and systems.

While many of these projects still make reference to the category of the image, they

generally overlook its most radical aspects, which come into focus through the framework

elaborated in the Cinema books. This chapter primarily concerns the digital image qua image.

The concept of the image is fundamental to Deleuze’s understanding of the cinema and develops

via a forceful rereading of Bergson. In Matter and Memory, Bergson begins by taking up the

concept of the image “in the vaguest sense of the word” (1). “Vagueness” here really indicates

generality; The Movement-Image follows Bergson’s lead by returning a level of generality to the

concept of the image. In Deleuze’s view, the historical moment of Matter and Memory was

characterized by a “crisis” in which the confrontation between “materialism and idealism” had

come to an impasse (Cinema 1 57). The notion of the image had become embedded in

psychological preconceptions. In order to rescue the concept of the image from the mire of a

subject-object distinction that had come to a dead end, Bergson dissociated the image from

consciousness. For Deleuze, Bergson’s image offers an alternative to the phenomenological

concept of the image which starts from the assumption of a “natural” perception. Instead of

beginning from the position of the image that the subject “sees” and interprets as a re-

presentation of some object, we begin instead from a state of “flowing-matter”: the primordial

condition of “a world in which IMAGE=MOVEMENT” (Cinema 1 57-58). The original

universe of the image exists in a “gaseous” or atomistic state where, in a single plane, all the

images interact and are fully “perceived” by all other images they come in contact with through

their actions, making matter and movement (interaction) indistinguishable. “There is no moving

body,” Deleuze writes, “which is distinguishable from executed movement” (58). At this level,

the universe as a whole can be defined as an infinite “machine-assemblage” of moving images, or in other words, a “metacinema” (59).

Considered in and of itself, “the image is matter” (59). At the same time, as Deleuze will later say in “The Exhausted,” “the image is not an object, but a ‘process’” (121). We can thus define this approach to the image in terms of a process-oriented materialism. An image is

knowable only through its interactions with other images, which define it. There is no need to

look for a deeper reality or substrate beneath the image itself. The image belongs not to a world

of objects and impressions but to a material flux, in which the substance if things is

indistinguishable from the ripples and agitations that animate it. From the starting point of this

universe of movement, we can then look at the organisms that eventually arise in terms of the

formation of “opacities” or “intervals” that subtract something from the total perception of an

image. Their (our) sensory organs function precisely by taking in less than the totality of the

image, creating the possibility of partial perceptions, directed actions, and mediation. Brains or

“zones of indetermination” are formed by the appearance of “a gap between an action and a

reaction” (62). The image does not have to wait for the arrival of consciousness to be “seen,”

however, if seeing is merely the propagation of light. Rather, “the eye is in things” (60); the

image, far from being phenomenal or subjective, stems from the originary condition of matter

appearing to itself.

Focusing on the image in this material sense allows us to approach the digital at an

appropriate level of generality such that we do not confuse its processes with their effects. In

recent years, some materialist thinkers have accused visual-oriented media theory of precisely

this kind of confusion. Early digital scholarship largely devoted itself to what appears on digital

screens rather than the processes that generate this output; Matthew Kirschenbaum’s

Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination describes digital scholarship in the first

decade of the 21st century as oriented towards “the phenomenological manifestation of the

application or digital event on the screen” (4). As a corrective, Kirschenbaum reminds us that

digital objects are physical and logical objects before they are conceptual ones, where “logical”

is used to refer to the level of software and computer code, and “conceptual” to the phenomenal

image (3). Kirschenbaum’s project involves an interrogation of the different forms of materiality

that pertain to digital texts, and scholars following this approach have shown an increasing

interest in investigating the behind-the-scenes materiality of computational machines, exposing their inner workings as a method of exposing the black boxes behind our digital media.

However, as Jacob Gaboury points out in “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as

Material Object,” ignoring the screen altogether in favor of the behind-the-scenes functioning of

the machine only produces another kind of critical omission. His solution is to read the digital

image “as an object structured by a set of distinct material practices,” thus leaving behind the

phenomenology of the screen but keeping the image as a digital/material construction made up of

visible and non-visible components, including algorithms, perceptual models, interfaces, etc.

(42).

Along these lines, I argue that the Deleuzian conception of the image is capacious enough

to include the invisible dimensions of electrons and code. Gaboury writes that digital technology

is “not in the first instance concerned with questions of vision or image” (40), but this

characterization only applies to the phenomenal image. The image as a material-processional

category is vast—encompassing wires and processing units as well as afferent nerves and brains.

Further, the very notion that computational machines embody the digital in a more “material” or primary way than screen images is predicated on a sense of causality grounded in objectivity.

The material-processional image, however, cuts against conventional technological hierarchies, authorizing us to look beyond particular devices and configurations for the abstract functionality of the digital image, which might precede, accompany or follow the technologies that have contingently caused it to proliferate. As we are frequently reminded in Cinema 2, the time-image cannot be deduced from the technical means through which it is brought to the screen, and the same can be said with regard to the digital image. Furthermore, the generality of Deleuze’s image-concept may allow us to get beyond the preconceptions of some contemporary digital- materialist thinking which would divide practices and objects from visuals and images. For just as the image on the digital screen may only be the product of a set of procedures and assumptions, the process itself can be conceptualized as yet another image. In this sense, the computer itself, the program itself, once brought out into the open, are just more images or instances of the digital, while the digital image itself must be conceptualized at a greater level of abstraction, in terms of the commonalities that place all of these things together in a taxonomy of images.

To begin tracing the taxonomy of the digital image as developed in the Cinema books initially means dealing with a problem of terminology, since the books do not have a singular or consistent way of referring to digital images. Instead, four designations are given for the new image: “l'image électronique,” “l'image télé,” “[l’image] vidéo,” and “l'image numérique”

(Cinéma 346). The range of these terms reflects the moment of the text’s composition, when the

digital was still very much under development. To demarcate the digital as Deleuze understood it

means finding an image that would belong to these four categories and can be deduced on the

basis of their commonalities and differences. The first three translate rather straightforwardly

into “electronic image,” “tele” image, and “video” image. “Electronic” situates the image in the

age of the circuit and of control systems. Grouping tele together with video clarifies that we are

not dealing with a question of transmission to the exclusion of storage, nor storage to the

exclusion of transmission; in other words, Deleuze doesn’t seem interested in making a firm

distinction between television as a form of ephemeral broadcasting and video as a preserving

medium. The final term in the list is what would commonly be translated into English as “digital

image” today, though Tomlinson and Galeta use a more literal translation: “numerical image.”

The term is distinct from “digitales” (347), which appears in a footnote as yet another name for

“les nouvelles images.” This can be taken as an image of the quantitative as well as an image produced by a quantitative logic, and both resonances will prove useful in glossing the descriptions that appear later in the passage. Closely associated with the digital nomenclature throughout this section are the terms “informatique” and “cybernetique,” the former of which is translated as “computer,” “computing,” and “informational,” but is also cognate with informatics and a synonym for data-processing (traitement de l'information). In the sections that follow,

space will be devoted to each aspect of the image as we come closer to consolidating the

function of the digital and ultimately relocating it under the auspices of a more general category:

the graphic. As I trace a circuitous route through The Time-Image’s conclusion towards a

Deleuzian concept of the digital, I will pay special attention to the lacunae in the text; it is in

these gaps and omissions that my own theorization of the digital will begin to take form.

I. Cybernetique: Specters of Control

The passage in which the digital image makes its appearance in the conclusion of Cinema

2 proceeds from a discussion of automation. Just before he introduces his description of the new

images, Deleuze resumes an earlier discussion of automata that gradually develops into a brief

mediation on the control society. Curiously, Walter Benjamin makes an appearance here, for the

first and only time in the two-volume series. As one of the most widely cited twentieth-century essays on film theory, Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological

Reproducibility” is conspicuous in its absence from the Cinema books, although Deleuze very likely has the piece in mind in chapter 7, when he describes the future promised by the movement image as “a subjective and collective automaton for an automatic movement: the art of the ‘masses’” (156-7). In fact, I want to suggest that the linkages between Benjamin and

Deleuze run deeper at the end of The Time-Image than one might guess based on what appears to be an isolated, passing reference. As a thinker whose point of reference is often media rather than cinema, Benjamin enters the text in a subtle way as a pivoting device that will allow Deleuze to introduce themes that point beyond the cinematic while remaining germane to it; it is in this context that the chapter finally allows us to begin thinking of cinema in terms of its death, its limit, its rivals, etc.

Benjamin’s concept of mechanical reproduction links to Deleuze’s automatism through the conjoined themes of political and psychomechanical ambivalence. Benjamin was the first to clearly articulate the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary potential between which the technologies of reproduction oscillate. In the case of photography in the nineteenth century,

Benjamin saw both a powerful, social and political tool and, at the same time, the catalyst that brought about the “negative theology” of an ardently apolitical, “pure art” aestheticism (“Work

of Art” 24). His well-known discussion of the cinema’s innate connection to mechanization—

paralleling the actor’s disjointed performance before the machine with the industrial worker’s

fragmented experience of labor in the factory—is couched in terms of the dangerous political

ambivalence attending new media technologies. This ambivalence stems from the power of the

mechanical medium to produce a synchronized reaction in the audience. Benjamin theorized the

cinema as the means for transforming the plural and disorganized masses into either a class or a

mass: a self-aware proletariat or a brainwashed, fascist mob (32-33). Mechanical reproduction thus brings about two possible, opposing cinemas. On the one hand, there is the cinema that provides the ideal aesthetic space for the working class to reflect and become politically conscious; on the other hand, the same screen and theater setting that organizes and awakens a class consciousness through reflection is equally ideal for psychologically consolidating a reactionary mass through pathos and spectacle.

According to Deleuze, this opposition frames the ultimate ambition of 1920s revolutionary filmmaking, which includes Eisenstein’s cinema-practice: “to reach the Dividual, that is, to individuate a mass as such, instead of leaving it in a qualitative homogeneity or reducing it to a quantitative divisibility” (Cinema 2 162). It may be the case that Benjamin’s anticipation of a transformative cinema was premature, ascribing too much autonomy to a cinema art that still existed under the form of the movement image. This is the sense we get in the beginning of chapter 7, when early cinema fails to deliver on its promises to awaken a collective consciousness. The negative possibility on the other hand does seem to come to fruition, grimly actualized by the rise of Hitler, Hollywood, and the society of the spectacle. This is where Deleuze locates the unique importance of “The Work of Art…” in connection with his own project. Much like Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler, “The Work of Art…”

establishes a psychological link between the cinema and the mentality that conditioned the rise of

totalitarianism in pre-war German society. Yet only Benjamin manages to conceptualize this link in terms of the common apparatus behind a hypnotic or narcotizing valence of the cinema and the 20th century configuration of authoritarian power. Because Benjamin’s essay “set itself inside

the cinema,” as Deleuze explains, the piece managed to glimpse a psychological machinery that

operated through the cinema, linking the mechanism of pre-war cinema with the mechanism of

fascist power. This mechanism will correspond to Deleuze’s psychological automaton in a

manner that sets the terms for his discussion of the control society. Deleuze sums up Benjamin's

argument as a demonstration of the fundamental connection between cinema’s automated

movement and “the automization of the masses, state direction, politics become ‘art’” (264).

Deleuze’s own sense of automation draws upon Benjamin’s critique of mechanical

reproduction but pairs it with a philosophical concept of the automaton that transcends industrial

mechanization. For Deleuze, there is an innate automatism in the way the cinema unfolds

sequences of shots or moving images; in doing so, it establishes a psychomechanics comparable

not to language but to the utterable “formed content” that language expresses (262). In The

Movement-Image, the cinema screen was defined as a “centre of indetermination,” the same phraseology Deleuze uses to define the brain (62). In unfolding sequences, cinema moves

amongst images as a brain or a living thing does, selectively and strategically. For these reasons,

the screen is capable of constituting an automaton in the sense of a “mechanical man”: a machine

that thinks or exists as a simulacrum of thought in the mind of the viewer (Cinema 2 263). This

machinery made of images is what Benjamin glimpsed “ambiguously” in his critique of

mechanical reproduction (264). Movements and mental processes are what constitute the

psychomechanics of the cinema, investing it with the power of its dual automatism: the

miraculous automatism of a thinking machine, and the precarious automatism of a hypnotized

sleepwalker (263). Once in our heads, the cinematic work can join with our other sequences of

memory and other impressions as an implantation, a false content that impinges upon how we

act, feel and perceive from the inside. In these instances, Deleuze intimates that cinema is no

better than propaganda and pornography, though exponentially more effective due to the power

of its automatism. Alternatively, it can provide the necessary and welcome friction to break the

chain of impressions, destabilize the rhythm of subjective time, and clear a space for reflection,

difference, and the possibility of thought. This latter polarity serves as the basis for an aesthetics

of the cinema. Deleuze echoes “The Work of Art…” in proposing these two polarities of

automata—spiritual and psychological—which provide the basis for two opposing cinematic practices: a cinema of thought and a cinema of somnambulism.

For Deleuze, Automatism provides the initial link between the cinema and the digital

image. Looking toward the future, Deleuze envisioned the cinema, like the broader technological

world, no longer being driven by machines that move but by machines that calculate: “a new

computer and cybernetic race, automata of computation and thought, automata with controls and

feedback” (264-265). Power, no longer consolidated in the symbolic figurehead of Caligari or

Hitler, becomes dispersed across an “information network.” Totalitarian structures and disciplinary institutions are gradually giving way to systems of dynamic regulation, data- processing, surveillance, all under the auspices of a generalized science and practice of control

(cybernetics). Readers of Deleuze will be familiar with these concepts from later in his corpus, where the idea of the control society is developed in a more complete way. Of the two major texts where Deleuze does this, “Postscript on the Societies of Control” is still several years away, and Foucault would not be coming out until the following year. This passage from The Time-

Image therefore provides a unique, early glimpse of Deleuze’s vision of the control society, which is widely considered to be his most substantive contribution to digital theory.5 Placed in the context of the broader discussion of automatism, this particular discussion of control unites the aesthetic and political dimensions of the concept in a manner not encountered elsewhere in his oeuvre. The aesthetics of the cinema originally belonged to the world of the factory and the urbanized masses, manifesting fundamental aspects of the “man-machine assemblage” (263).

The possibility of a will-to-art in cinema depended on the invention of a machine that could break down: a frictional, self-destructing mechanism within the engines of the movement-image.

In this passage, the control society emerges briefly to clear away the old machinery and set the stage for a new automatism conditioning the possibility of a new, digital aesthetics.

II. Informatique: Regime of Order-Words

The pair of characterizations that most decisively link the new automata with the themes of the control society developed elsewhere in Deleuze’s work are “informatique et cybernétique”

(Cinéma 346). Cybernetics and information-processing define the form and function of the new society predicted at the end of The Time-Image. Viewed structurally, the exercise of power in the control society takes the form of cybernetics (κυβερνητική), a mode of governance which

Norbert Weiner theorized in terms of a regulatory system that uses feedback to adjust and maintain itself. Information acts as the currency of the new power structure; as Deleuze writes in the “Postscript”: “the numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it” (5). The information itself consists of nothing more or less than a set of directives, which can be deployed, withheld, ignored or followed. In a lecture delivered two years after the publication of L’image-temps, Deleuze defines information as “a grouping of

order-words” (“Having an Idea” 17). An “order-word” fulfills a control-function in directing its

recipient’s actions by demarcating a set of acceptable responses. Order-words form into

commandments which generate patterns of behavior automatically (a new form of automatism).

In this manner, information restructures the process of communication. A century earlier, it

would have been sensible to define communication in terms of knowledge, and earlier still, in

terms of space, material, or shared feeling.6 In the information age, the exemplar of

communication is the “communiqué” issued by the police:

We are told what we are supposed to be ready or able to do or what we are supposed to

believe. Not even to believe but to act as if we believed. We are not asked to believe but

to behave as if we believed. That is information, communication, and apart from these

order-words and their transmission, there is no information, no communication. (17)

These remarks take place within a larger discussion of the societal structures that come after the

disciplinary society as defined by Michel Foucault. He concludes his point on communication

and order-words by stating unequivocally that “information is precisely the system of control”

(17).

Information is the last problem of the cinema—and implicitly, the first problem of the

digital image—that Deleuze addresses in The Time-Image. The problem of information is that it merely regulates between order-givers and order-receivers that are already in place, moving along chains of command that are already established. Information begins and ends in a black- boxed channel, since “the source of information is not a piece of information any more than is the person informed.” Rather, source and receiver are assumed, and the homeostatic tendency of order-words will be toward maintaining them in their relative positions. As such, information is always in favor of the status quo, always disappointing, unaffecting, anonymous, and essentially

useless. In discussing Syberberg’s German trilogy, Deleuze writes that: “what makes information all-powerful (the newspapers, and then the radio, and then the television), is its very nullity, its radical ineffectiveness.” In order to “go beyond information,” cinema had to pose a question that informatics could not answer, namely: “what is the source and what is the addressee?” (269). It is with regard to this particular problem of information that Deleuze makes the claim that “the life or the afterlife of cinema depends on its internal struggle with informatics” (270).

In his reading of Syberberg, Deleuze sets up an opposition between information and the speech-act. Hitler: A Film from Germany is a film about (and against) information in the way it confronts the problem of information’s historical nullity: the ineffectual nature of merely possessing information about atrocities. The holocaust is presented as the first instance of the unimaginable horror that is not stopped by the spread of information, presaging an absurd and tragic state of affairs in which the world is shocked ad nauseam by the failure of knowledge to prevent each and every approaching disaster. The challenge is to critique information without sinking to the level of information—i.e., without delivering a “message.” Essentially, for a film to grapple successfully with the problem of information, it has to address the ubiquity of information while resisting its homogenizing effects. To this end, Syberberg constructs a discursive universe in which the information network has replaced nature. With no continuity of place, time, or plot, the film contains hours of banal autobiographical monologues delivered by actors playing Hitler’s staff, pseudo-documentarian montages of historical stills and film clips, and surreal, nonsensically staged vignettes. This universe is presented in a decentered way, as though from the perspective of information itself, which churns aimlessly in a “non-totalizable complexity”:

a vast space of information, like a complex, heterogeneous, anarchic space where the

trivial and the cultural, the public and the private, the historic and the anecdotal, the

imaginary and the real are brought close together, and sometimes on the side of speech,

discourses, commentaries, familiar or ancillary testimonies, sometimes on the side of

sight, of existing or no longer existing settings, engravings, plans and projects, acts of

seeing with acts of clairvoyance, all of equal importance and forming a network, in kinds

of relationship which are never those of causality. (268-69)

The “informational space” fabricated by Syberberg creates a feedback-loop that amplifies the

cacophony of information, turning signal into noise and imposing the stutter of creative speech

onto null data. “The visual data must be organized in superimposed layers, endlessly mixed up,”

Deleuze writes, “from which the speech-act will emerge, will rise up on the other side” (268).

Out of the nullity of information emerges the possibility of a speaker and a speech-act.

Though Hitler presents this possibility as arriving “too-late”—“when information has already

gained control of speech-acts, and when Hitler has already captured the German myth or

irrational”—Deleuze argues that Syberberg’s film nevertheless offers a cinematic solution to the

problem of information through the opposing concept of the speech-act (270). In this context,

speech-act signifies a creative act, “story-telling or legend-making,” which “must extricate itself from all the spoken information” (268). Although Deleuze’s term for story-telling in the original text of L’Image-Temps is “fabulation”—a word that takes on a profound significance in the theorization of the creative act in Deleuze’s later work—the context clues point in the direction of another term that is evoked without being written: the German erzählen (typically translated

as “story-telling”). Indeed, Walter Benjamin is once again the unnamed interlocutor here; it is

difficult to image how this discussion of information and storytelling would be possible without

Walter Benjamin’s 1936 essay “Der Erzähler.” In that text, the information age is depicted as an

upheaval of experience that nullifies the meaning-making practices that were shaped by and for a now vanished world: “a generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions” (84). For Deleuze, the storyteller is characterized as the figure who, by “surviving the end of the world,” escapes from the nullity of information and regains the ability to speak (Cinema 2 270). Similarly,

Benjamin’s “Storyteller” begins from the standpoint of the death of the storyteller and the foreclosure of the possibility of sharing stories in in the wake of the First World War, and it ends with death itself as the spiritual origin of all storytelling. Against a growing muteness and incommunicability of experience, Benjamin’s storyteller is finally the archetype of a figure who returns from the end of the world: the dying man whose proximity to the end “imparts to everything that concerned him that authority which even the poorest wretch in dying possesses for the living around him” (94). The etymology of the title anticipates Benjamin’s recourse to death and guides the distinction between information and fabulation that reappears in Deleuze; the prefix “er” in erzähler conveys the sense of an act taken to its completion, to its fruition, or to the point of death (e.g., erfrieren: to freeze to death). In this sense, all storytellers can be said to

“borrow” their authority to tell from death itself, though Benjamin argues that information, as a

“new form of communication,” has come to displace even this ultimate form of testimony (88).

Information acting as a deathless, cybernetic automaton terrorizes the viewer in the form of

Syberber’s Hitler, but the film falls short of delivering “redemption, art beyond knowledge

…creation beyond information” (Cinema 2 270). It is precisely at this point that Deleuze begins

to imagine an “afterlife” of cinema in which the aesthetic function would be motivated by and

conceived in terms of the problem of information. The word “afterlife” refers back to Deleuze’s

earlier declaration that “the tele and video image…had to transform cinema or to replace it, to

mark its death” (265). Only at this point, in full view of the tripartite death of cinema, death of

narrative, and death of the speech-act does the importance of a digital aesthetic to Deleuze’s

project begin to come into focus.

III. Télé / Vidéo: A Historical Digression

At this point, it should be clear that the cybernetic and informatic forms of automation

that condition the aesthetics of the digital image constitute a distinct set of problems from those

addressed by the cinema. We are now prepared to draw together the disparate features of the

digital image into the missing concept that marks the conclusion of The Time-Image, but first we

must leave Deleuze and his intertexts for a moment to consider (1) where the historical “tele and

video” image fits within the larger category of the digital and (2) how it embodies the control

society to which the digital aesthetic must respond. Deleuze wrote relatively little about the

medium of television, and what few remarks he did make are generally contemptuous and

suspicious. In his “Letter to Serge Daney” for instance, Deleuze finds television to be technically

perfect and aesthetically barren. As a medium of mass social conditioning, television threatens to

bring about cinema’s “second death” precisely because it is “the form in which the new powers of ‘control’ become immediate and direct” (75). Indeed, the histories of cybernetic information theory and television engineering attest to their being intertwined parts of a singular development

towards revolutionizing communication. Of the two major developments that led to the

contemporary concept of information that Deleuze maligns, one was the standardized

quantification of information, first proposed in R. V. L. Hartley’s 1928 article “Transmission of

Information” as a means of perfecting “television over both wire and radio paths” (535); the

other was the abstraction of the sender-receiver context, which was also framed within a

discussion of television in a 1937 issue of Discovery: the Journal of Popular Knowledge (OED).

Even before the discourse of cybernetics had been codified, television had already begun

to actualize the image of information-processing in the form of a visual, cybernetic automaton. In

the same year that Benjamin published “The Storyteller,” an article titled “Telefilmed Faces”

appeared in the Sunday edition of The New York Times, providing what is possibly the earliest

surviving description of a television newscast. During this embryonic moment in the history of

television news, “the few observers who have television receivers in their homes saw the two

major nominees in the presidential race talking to political gatherings as photographed by

newsreel camera men.” According to the article, this national political coverage was immediately

followed by a turn towards the international in the form of another newsreel “on the Spanish

rebellion,”7 and then, as the author of the article puts it, “the television ‘eye’ was next turned on

a large poster and several small objects, including buttons on a dress, to demonstrate its ability to broadcast all things which the electric camera ‘sees.’” The peculiar organization of this program reflects the very earliest notions about what television coverage was expected to accomplish: at once, a continuation of the newsreel form and also a more immediate analogue for real-time vision than the newsreel had ever offered. Not unlike Dziga Vertov’s poetic vision of a futuristic all-seeing kino-eye in Man with a Movie Camera (1929),8 this camera offers itself here to

television viewers as a prosthetic “eye.” The principal difference is that the “eye” mainly aims to

exhibit its own technical specifications—advertising the level of detail or closeness that can be

achieved—with indifference to content replacing Vertov’s breathless enthusiasm. The televisual

already partakes of what Deleuze calls in the letter to Daney “a professional training of the eye, a

world of controllers and controlled communing in their admiration for technology, mere

technology” (72).

The technical gaze of television, which Deleuze referred to as the “contact lens,” was

specularized to its fullest extent in the first episodes of Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now.

Premiering in 1951, See It Now was supposed to be the televisual equivalent of I Can Hear It

Now, a spoken word album created by journalist Edward R. Murrow and producer Fred Friendly

which, according to Murrow was the height of unfiltered, audio realism: “every voice we used

was real . . . every sound, raw. . . . No actors; no sound effects” (qtd. in Engelman 82). The title

and format of See It Now harken back to early television’s fundamental ambition to open an

electric “eye” to the world of the present moment, producing a condition of total visibility. With

the novelty of televisual “seeing” already beginning to wear off, the See It Now cameras

inaugurate the program by presuming to fulfill the conquest of space that was promised since

before the birth of the medium. Ralph Engelman, in his book Friendlyvision: Fred Friendly and

the Rise and Fall of TV Journalism recounts that:

During its first season, See It Now focused on displaying the technological prowess of

television as a news medium, not on addressing injustices and controversial political

topics. “They felt awed by their new medium,” the broadcast historian Erik Barnouw

writes of Murrow and Friendly’s early television broadcasts, “and needed to spend time

exclaiming over the wonder of it.” (87)

The heart of the show’s aesthetic of wonderment involved creating a patchwork of pictorial

views from a diverse set of locales. Using “four mobile camera reporter crews, supplemented by regular CBS television news correspondents, plus material from newsreel companies and news

agencies,” the show set about weaving together a collage-like vision of the world as a totality of

discrete bits of data (78).

The sixth episode of See It Now opens characteristically with a series of shots that

showcase the studio technology in all its inscrutable grandeur, exhibiting a vast array of

monitors, cameras, and instrument panels. The sequence ends on Murrow in a control room,

surrounded by monitors. Murrow begins the show by proclaiming the audience that they are

about to “look out upon this generous and capacious land as though looking out a window.”

First, the viewer is instructed to “get oriented” and given a series of shots of New York City in

the vicinity of the CBS studio building. The New York exterior shots are immediately followed

by Murrow informing the audience that they will now “travel over 5000 miles,” cuing a pre- filmed segment of American soldiers in Korea. At the end of the segment, Murrow instructs his production team to keep the soldiers “on monitor one and give us San Francisco live on monitor two.” The remainder of the program consists of a rapid succession of very brief live segments taking place in cities across the United States. The correspondent in each locale Murrow contacts begins by giving the local time, temperature, and population of their city. The camera work in each city begins with a pan of the skyline, followed by a cut to a street level view in some characteristic area. For the Chicago segment, Murrow takes the opportunity to recite a Carl

Sandburg poem. For Kentucky, an old style mansion and Kentucky colonel are placed on view.

The Alcoa advertisement near the end of the episode shows their aluminum being used to make pre-packaged Christmas dinners for the soldiers “7000 miles away from home.” In his closing monologue, Murrow expresses his sentiments that the purpose of has been to reveal “this

capacious land” in order “to remind you that all of it is home,” followed by some ominous

remarks in which Murrow raises the possibility that in the near future, “more soldiers will die,

children will never know peace, and great cities will be destroyed…” Unlike most other news

programs, the first episodes of See It Now are unique in that they seem to lack the alibi of an

event. The future is invoked in terms of a total, annihilating catastrophe,9 but the present is

sheltered in the nullity of information.

IV. Électronique: Cinema of the Circuit

The peculiar fascination of See It Now lies in the program’s transparent and virtually

objectless reflection of its medium. The electronic signal swims idly through the channels of an

information network, illuminating and mapping the network. Occasionally there is an attempt at

training the viewer in a shorthand visual language, but mainly the impetus is to reveal and trace

the network, catalogue its distances, etc. As Deleuze will say, the function is social rather than

aesthetic. If video has unique capacities that find their expression in the domain of video art,

television seems primarily interested in suppressing these capacities in favor of a “noetic

emptiness” (74). A program like See It Now can provide a direct image of the cybernetic system

of control to which it bears a relationship of identity, but an aesthetic dimension requires

indirectness, non-identity, difference. Since cinema already possesses an innate aesthetic and noetic function through the time-image, it stands to reason that the aesthetic problems of electronic media might be best addressed from within the cinema. In fact, the time-image anticipates and prefigures the function of the electronic image in numerous respects. Syberberg’s treatment of information has already given us one example of this. Deleuze also cites Godard’s

Two or Three Things I Know About Her as a film that moves decisively in the direction of an entirely cybernetic ontology, in virtue of which:

the frame or the screen functions as instrument panel, printing or computing table, the

image is constantly being cut into another image, being printed through a visible mesh,

sliding over other images in an ‘incessant stream of messages,’ and the shot itself is less

like an eye than an overloaded brain endlessly absorbing information: it is the brain-

information, brain-city couple which replaces that of eye-Nature. (267)

Mirroring the conditions of electronic media, the experiential and anthropic dimensions of seeing

in the film are supplanted by a quantitative and computational scheme, and the body that might

serve as the point-of-reference for the images of classical cinema is subordinated to the geometry

of the grid, the horizontal and vertical axes of two-dimensional surfaces. A computational

aesthetic is deployed, allegedly in service of the facts (things I know), but ultimately functioning

to dramatize the breakdown or “overload” of the brain circuit. As with Syberberg, Godard’s only

recourse against information lies in overburdening the control system, putting too much

information in play for the viewer to absorb, or making the categories of information too

interspersed, too and subtly delineated to be processed. In this sense, extrapolating 2 or 3 things into a series (2,3,4,…) becomes a strategy against the automatism of information-processing.

Significantly, Godard takes up the information aesthetic prior to—and independently of—his experiments in video. The technology is not the decisive factor in this aesthetic, unless one shifts focus to the image itself as a technology: a technique for becoming commensurate with the circuitry of the control society in order to express something relevant to it. The technique of Two or Three Things I Know About Her—which involves intertitles, streaming narration, irrational cuts, and monologues delivered to camera—demonstrates Godard’s larger project of a non-hierarchical machinic assemblage achieved through the innovation of a cinematic serialism. The concept of the series ranges over several disciplines, including

mathematics, music, circuitry and stratigraphy. The generalized form of the series involves,

respectively, a sequence of numbers, a sequence of tonal sets, a sequence of resistors applied to a

single source of current, or a sequence of geological layers defining a chronology. For Deleuze,

the series is defined by its limit: the point or quantity that it approaches or converges upon,

which in the case of cinema is any aesthetic category (Cinema 2 276). Deleuze interprets the limit as two-sided in Godard, such that the sequence of images approaches and then moves away from the limit, whether it be a character, a color palette, a theme, etc. The difference between See

It Now and 2 or 3 Things… is the difference between a parallel circuit and a series circuit; the former constantly circles back to the start, producing concentric paths of varying distance in relation to an origin point or home, while the latter must make its way through every component in a single path.

V. Numérique: The Digital/Graphical

Godard’s serialism is a numerical strategy that addresses the numerical nature of the new automata Deleuze describes. Of all the categories (or limits) traversed in our attempt to diagram or approximate the function of the digital image, the numerical remains the most constitutive. As we’ve seen, cybernetics and information-processing classify the form and function of the control automata; tele and video provide the technological basis for their social institution; and electronics provides the material pathway along which the new cerebral automation must travel.

By contrast, the numerical is where the most general and defining qualities of the new images are to be found. Our ultimate objective is to return the digital to the material-processional category

of the image, to conceive of it in terms of relational, spatial, and temporal functions—in terms

comparable to the movement and time-image. While Deleuze is definite in his assertion that

“l’image numerique” could play a pivotal role in the future of cinema, his other claims about the

new image are ventured tentatively, with the understanding that the new image had not yet

revealed its potential—or declared its allegiances. According to Deleuze, the new images “have a

right side and a reverse, reversible and non-superimposable.” They are subject to a divisibility in

virtue of which “a new image can arise from any point whatever of the preceding image.” They

exist in “an omni-directional space” with no link to human bodily-spatial orientation. And when they occupy the screen, the screen ceases to frame a perspectival space, and instead “constitutes a table of information, an opaque surface on which are inscribed 'data'” (Cinema 2 265).

Finally, we can summarize the new images in a single sentence: the screen functions as a

page. Having a front and back, an orientation that can be turned and rotated, inscription surfaces

and cuttable/graftable elements: these are all the familiar features of the page. More specifically,

what these descriptions point to is the image that “digitizes” the page, the figure or form that

joins with the page to form the original binary code of representationalism: namely, the graphic.

The properties of the digital image defined in numerical terms are already familiar to us as the

properties of graphics. At the most general level, graphics are visual forms inscribed in a surface.

Though the concept of the graphic intersects with the fields of painting and photography, a useful

distinction can be made by looking to the graphic’s fundamental units, which are points and

lines. The graphic or formal line establishes an opposition which distinguishes figure from

ground, part from whole, matter from space, etc. Its function is to create oppositions and

identities, in contrast to the abstract line. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze writes that the

abstract line “acquires all its force from giving up the model - that is to say, the plastic symbol of

the form - and participates in the ground all the more violently in that it distinguishes itself from

it without the ground distinguishing itself from the line” (37). The ideal of the graphic line—its

indivisible elemental form—is the point. By contrast, the abstract line refers to no ideal, but its

most reduced manifestation is the mark. In addition to marks and points, one can also distinguish

between points and grains, which act as the atomic components of granular media like

photography. Though more compact than the mark, the grain lacks the intentionality of the point.

Painting deals with the abstract line as well as the formal line, and photography with grains as

well as points. Therefore, graphic images may be realized in photography, painting, or other

media, but only in cases where space and form have a graphical function. My use of the term

graphic, here and elsewhere, refers specifically to the graphic function. By definition, the graphic

line or point introduces a binary which is the basis of all graphic representation.

Until the eighteenth century, graphic representation served only figural and decorative

purposes. Once infographics emerged, it became clear that the graphic line could represent data

with no counterpart in the physical world just as well as it could represent the forms of nature.

The present, digital age was preceded by a revolution in information graphics and announced by

a revolution in computer graphics.10 The graphic also configures the prehistory of cinema, in the form of graphical and quantitative data-representation projects, such as those of Étienne-Jules

Marey. In the case of The Time-Image, Deleuze is not working from a theory or history of graphics or of the digital, but from an expertise in the philosophy of images. Therefore, he doesn’t explicitly make a connection between the digital and the graphic—or the graphic and the cinema—but instead works backwards, separating the noticeable attributes of emerging digital images from the images of the cinema he has just finished thoroughly explicating across two volumes. From this unique vantage point, he encounters digital images transposing graphical properties from the page to the screen. The interplay of these images suggests a fundamental binarism which allows them to detach and reverse, which treats the screen image as a non-

physical representational objectivity, not a shade or an intensity or a contour but a discrete, intentional and codable thing, namely, a graphic. This binarism is not coextensive with the specific binary that encodes the image in the computer or transmits it in digital television, but refers to a more encompassing digitizing-regime that includes and informs all of these. The apotheosis of the graphic into the abstract infographic makes way for the diagram, the network plan, the treatment of information as a quantity and ultimately an object. The digital aesthetic or will-to-art, we can finally conclude, must not address itself to computation (in the form of the incomputable or information overload) but to the image that includes it and makes it possible: the numerical or graphic image.

Conclusion: Digital Aesthetics and Beginning Again

The conclusion of The Time-Image draws together several distinct categories of image: televisual, video, digital, numerical and electronic. The logic of this chapter is arrayed amongst these categories which form the limits in a transforming sequence; it moves toward one term and away from it toward the next in an attempt to make the form of the undertaking commensurate with its content. At the same time, this exercise was always shadowed by the motivating objective of discovering a metaphysical category large enough and secure enough in which to situate Deleuze’s unfinished concept of the digital. Instead of a technologically-defined digital, our category must be one that expresses the digital in terms of functional and spatial relations.

The distinguishing features are two-dimensionality, omni-directionality, graft-ability, totalizing perspective (no outside), horizontality, and absolute legibility. Put in these terms, digital space is coextensive with graphical space. Although Deleuze doesn’t include “graphic” among his terms

for digital image, his detailed spatial descriptions of the digital can finally only be understood in

terms of a graphical image.

Deleuze speculates that the value (or redemption) of electronic automatism must lie with

an emergent artistic potential either within the time-image itself or beyond it, but in either case, beyond the scope and historical reach of his project. Cinema 1 and 2 consist of a taxonomy and an arsenal of concepts for thinking the cinema. At the same time, the work proceeds historically, by reimagining the history of film and remapping its pivotal moments. The transition from silent film to sound film is deliberately de-emphasized in favor of a more profound shift from a cinema of action to one of reflection, affection, and finally, direct temporality. All of this forms the basis for a compelling aesthetics. To fully explain (and prove) the existence of the digital/graphical aesthetic, there must be a history and a philosophy to corroborate the taxonomy elaborated here.

The skeptical reader is advised to look to the next chapters for this history and this philosophy.

The purpose of this chapter has been to begin a process of thinking that will have to find its conclusion elsewhere. Conceptually, this chapter looks to follow the Cinema books’ own way of beginning, as much as it is concerned with their way of concluding. Deleuze begins The

Movement-Image by addressing what seems like a missed opportunity in Bergson’s Creative

Evolution. Bergson speaks of the cinema in CE as analogical to natural perception with regards to fact that both give the illusory impression of movement as something constituted from immobile states.11 Aside from serving as the best illustration of this universal error, the cinema

as Bergson saw it in 1907 is an unremarkable phenomenon. Bergson perhaps failed to see how

the repetition/reproduction of an illusion can differ from the original—often either dispelling the

illusory quality or providing the means to do so. By repeating within perception what normally

takes place “above” it (2), the cinema provides the means to break the spell of a subject-centered

and movement-dependent concept of time. The key to understanding cinematic time actually lies, then, in the conceptual work that led Bergson here in the first place, the work of Matter and

Memory, which revealed the priority of a-subjective time over the habitual, subjective formula.

Bergson’s error or neglect thus provides us with the itinerary of Deleuze’s project. The opening six paragraphs of The Movement-Image—which inaugurate, in a sense, the whole two-volume project—end with an allusion to the more complex concept of time elaborated in Matter and

Memory, and a promise to reveal, within that complexity, a prefiguration of “the future or the essence of cinema” (3). The opening section of Cinema thereby appropriates a space for philosophy and the cinema to encounter one another which happens to be the site of an earlier, aborted encounter between the two practices. In this way, the work that follows is able to find itself entirely within the locality of a philosophical tradition while simultaneously unfolding within that space the conceptual mappings of an entirely different creative practice.

The writing that precedes this section constitutes a quasi-repetition of Cinema’s opening, space-clearing gesture. It is situated within The Time-Image and principally concerns the specter of the digital image that makes an appearance at its conclusion. Although, at first, the digital image is announced as a potential harbinger of the next transformation that will reform cinema from within, making it unrecognizable to itself, Deleuze undercuts this possibility in two ways.

For one, he draws attention back to the cinematic antecedents of the digital that operated within the logic of the time-image, and without the technological element of machine encoding. At the same time, he emphasizes the conceptual barrenness of the digital, narrowly construed, as it materializes an aesthetically null system of information-as-control. It would be a mistake and a distortion to present too neat and tidy a parallel here; Deleuze’s reservations concerning the digital image are not exactly like Bergson’s underestimation of the cinema. However, there is an

irresistible symmetry of form in the way the Cinema books begin and end with a media practice

being withheld philosophical significance: first in Bergson, as a matter to be corrected, then in

Deleuze’s own thought, as a matter to be decided in the future. Cinema leaves us waiting to find

out whether the redemption of the digital image will take place, but it does so partially as a way

of showing that we have come to the edge of the map: to the end of what can be said about the

cinema’s temporal modalities without crossing over into a space the cinema has no claim over

(yet). There is almost the sense, then, that the repetition is meant to function as a self-conscious framing (or tracing) device; the assertion that the electronic image “spoils…or in contrast, relaunches” a regime of signs already called upon by the time-image is so reminiscent of the claim that cinema relaunches or “imitates” perception that it is hard not to read into this ending a stylized return to the beginning, or an intimation of the possibility of beginning again (267). To begin again requires that we discover a space within the Cinema books for a new conceptual history of the digital image.

CHAPTER 2: GENEALOGIES OF THE DIGITAL SCREEN

Television news is basically different in concept than either the radio news program or the movie newsreel, and satisfactory visualization is its keystone.

-Chester Burger12

Introduction: the Page-Like Screen

Scrolling through CBSNews.com’s homepage in 2017, one encounters something

extremely commonplace, as digital environments go: dozens of images, nested within columns

of text and hyperlinks; a line graph and chart detailing the fluctuations of the NASDAQ; a

satellite map of a Syrian airbase with an overlay of numerical data; an embedded, live-TV

videostream—the stream itself divided into a lower-third graphic containing the CBSN logo

and headline bar and several split screen images, each of which contained some combination

of CBS logos, maps, and barely visible screens nested within its background. This

hypermediated display may be unique to the age of personal computers and networked

devices, but the underlying visual principles that organize it, providing the display with an

interior spatial logic, are not. By the time digital interfaces like this arrived, the kind of

information-space that provided their visual scaffolding had already been normalized; they

present a manner of seeing that is already our way of seeing: a manner of seeing that is

involved with infographical space in historically unique and era-defining ways. Infographical

space constitutes the non-physical, non-mimetic, two-dimensional space of visually signifying

surfaces populated by abstract information. Through data visualizations, digital environments,

and other visual interfaces, infographic space now asserts itself as the primary form of

mediated space. The graphical space of digital interfaces has become “infrastructural” in

precisely the sense John Durham Peters writes about in The Marvelous Clouds; it belongs to

the domain of behind-the-scenes media whose existence is so fundamental to the mundane functioning of everyday life that they become unnoticeable. Unconsciously attuned to

infographic space’s rules and conventions, we lose awareness of the peculiarities of form

inherent in these graphical displays of information.

To see the world as the visible side of information is now a natural thing: an innate

philosophy suggested by the kinds of images that now predominate. This state of affairs is

conceivable only in light of the relatively recent, universal expansion of infographic space.

Understanding how infographic space organizes and represents the world is therefore integral

to navigating everyday semantic situations in the digital age. However, it is difficult to

extricate the history and meaning-making operations of infographic space from the history of

data- processing machines and computer graphics,13 the scholarly conversations and

functionality of these subjects being so intertwined. While computer graphics in the basic

sense of images produced by a computer are a product of digital technology, infographics are a

technology in their own right. Furthermore, while many digital media theorists have turned

away from the analysis of interfaces and screens toward a less phenomenologically-bound concept of digital objects—rooted in the unseen dimension of computer code—the history of code can no more explain the architecture of contemporary screen space than analysis of screen content can reveal the inner machinations of digital technologies. In fact, the kind of screen space that predominates today belongs as much to the history of television as an information technology as it does to the history of computing. Computer screen graphics first

came into existence in the context of the U.S. military’s Semi-Automatic Ground Environment

(SAGE) projects in the 1950s. MIT’s Whirlwind computer, completed in 1951, was the first

computer developed for the display of graphics in real-time and was used as a central

processing unit by SAGE (Turk 2006, 65). Television infographics predate these developments

by at least a decade. 20th century media history sheds light on the ways in which graphic space

transformed and was transformed by electronic screen space long before it became the basis of

the standard computer interface.

This chapter will trace the history of information graphics’ migration from the page to

the screen with emphasis on major transformations that took place in the mid-20th century.

When the primary arena of graphic space shifted from the page to the screen, the spatial dimension of visual information was transformed. The cartographic dimension or “mapping

impulse” of the cinema served as the immediate precursor to the infographic screen. Later, the

television news visualizations that began to appear in the pre-World War II experimental

period paved the way for the complex screen infographics of the digital age. Television news

provides some of the earliest examples of informational graphics intentionally adapted to the

parameters of the screen and incorporating the elements of dynamic movement and

malleability that make contemporary graphic displays of information so fundamentally

different than their printed counterparts. Moreover, these early news visualizations are among

the first public-facing images to reflect the larger conceptual shift in how information is

defined and represented that characterizes the dominant ideology of the twentieth century

information society: an ideology first manifested by the control systems and network theories

that became the cornerstones of cybernetics, and later materialized by the ubiquitous

information-phenomena of the internet age.

In the previous chapter, I proposed a theory of the digital image as a graphically structured image and of the contemporary digital image as an infographic image that reconfigures the space of the screen. To ground this theory in the Deleuzian aesthetic discourse to which it responds, I sought spaces within Deleuze’s work where the place of the digital in the larger societal and aesthetic history of the image could be traced and elaborated. This chapter will move away from the language of Deleuze in favor of a vocabulary that draws upon contemporaneous discourses surrounding the image-making practices of the mid-twentieth century. The work of the previous chapter gives us a reason to take a closer look at the infographic screen, as the relationship between infographics and the digital has been revealed as one of conceptual identity rather than contingent, phenomenal association. It authorizes us to ask questions about the infographic screen and its images from the standpoint that these images are intrinsically linked to the problem of aesthetics in the digital age, for these images constitute the unaesthetic form of the image that digital aesthetics must deform or confront. However, rather than rely upon Deleuzian concepts to discuss and classify these images, I will ultimately consider what new concepts they generate within their own accompanying discourses. The infographic screens of the twentieth century bring with them not only a new form of the image, but also a new way of conceptualizing images in terms of “visualization.” I will end this chapter with a consideration of the concept of infographic information visualization that emerges out of early television. I will suggest how this concept might affect our understanding of the space and place of the digital in light of the previous chapter. In shifting to another discursive register, I hope that this chapter will not only make concrete some of the conceptual abstractions of chapter one, but also provide a necessary friction, so that my concept of the

infographic/digital can retain a structural openness through the differing codes of

interpretation that each successive chapter puts into play.

I. Infographic Cinema

Before infographic spaces began to invade the screen, the earliest attempts to introduce

page-like partitions and graphic panels into the fundamental architecture of screen space came

from the advertising industry. By 1912, advertising had thoroughly integrated graphic and textual

spaces into the visual milieu of the city in the form of billboards, sky writing and sky lights.

Around this time, cinema advertising entered into an experimental phase that spawned many

attempts at hybridizing screen-space with ad-space. Jeremy Groskopf’s “Profit Margins: Silent

Era Precursors of Online Advertising Tactics” recounts how audiences at the time would become enraged whenever cinemas would play an ad reel in the midst of an evening’s entertainment.

This led advertisers to seek out ways to “advertise around” the cinematic space without entirely

“hijacking the screen.” Beginning in 1912, patents began to appear around the concept of an advertising sidebar “resting at the borders of the film experience,” which could be either “in- theater” or in the margins of the screen itself (85). In one version, a box placed beside the screen would display scrolling content in the form of a perforated paper strip backlit by a lamp. To perform a useful task and draw the viewer’s attention, the paper scroll would be synchronized to the film reel and would include updates on how much time had passed in the film and how much time remained, thus functioning as a paratext or metadata source in relation to the main reel (87).

In 1915, Frank C. Thomas proposed a system that would border the screen in illuminated panels in the form of light boxes projecting through interchangeable, translucent advertising cards. In this system, the rectangular advertisements would adjoin the screen on all sides and effectively

serve as an extension of the screen space. An even more invasive vision came from director T.

Hayes Hunter, who “advocated the printing of all films with an oval mask” so that

advertisements could be printed in the margins of the film strip itself (88). While none of these

proposed techniques caught on, the fact of their existence serves as both a prefiguration of the

kind of internally partitioned space the screen represents today and a precursor to the conceptual

shift in how the boundaries of the screen are imagined and demarcated that would take place a

few decades later, with the advent of television.

There is a parallel between screen history and print history when it comes to the

evolution of infographics, in that both began with the map long before moving on to other

graphic forms. In print history, one finds centuries of mapmaking traditions predating the 18th

century innovation of abstract infographics (bar charts, time series, etc.). Shortly after cinema

arrives in the 19th century, maps and cartographic elements find a place in the moving image

screen. In “Cinema’s Mapping Impulse,” Teresa Castro explores the visual and rhetorical

connections between early cinema and cartography through the cartographic forms and

perspectives inherent in certain cinematic representations of space. Castro cites the Charles

Urban Trading Company, a pioneering production company in the educational and news cinema

genres, as an organization that conceptualized filmmaking as a “cartographic enterprise, whose

aim was to make the world visually immediate” (9). Castro finds other examples of this mapping

impulse in travelogue and ethnographic films, whose function is “to fill the blank spaces in the

spectator’s imagination” (10). More generally, the whole, totalizing project of non-fiction

filmmaking in the 1900s, with its ubiquitous “scenes of cities, rural and natural landscapes, tours of foreign countries” and “phantom rides,” engages in “the careful scaling and coding of the world through filmic means, namely horizontal and 360˚ panoramic shots,” as though film itself

could represent a vast, cartographic venture (12). In the 1910s and 1920s, this takes the form of a literal photo-cartographic project, Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planète, which sought to bring together a collection of films and photographic material that could serve as a visual record of the entire world. In Kahn’s project as well as Charles Urban’s, the screen is figured as a page in a different sense than that of graphic partitioning. Here, the screen functions as the pages of an atlas, in which a series of scaled images in succession constitutes an encyclopedic account of the world, forming a cartographic and informative whole from a collection of synchronized aerial and panoramic displays.

Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s Unthinking Eurocentrism situates the mapping impulse of cinema and Western cartography within a colonialist project of self-centering that “envisions the world from a single privileged point.” This project operates through a binarization in which the map as an innately space-coding infographic is integral. “Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the ‘West and the Rest,’ they write, “and organizes everyday language into binaristic hierarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our ‘nations,’ their ‘tribes’; our ‘religions,’ their ‘superstitions’; our ‘culture,’ their ‘folklore’; our ‘art,’ their ‘artifacts’…” (2). It should come as no surprise, then, that among the first films to prominently feature a map is Martin E. Johnson’s 1918 documentary Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific. The map in this film is rendered cinematic by an animated line that moves across the surface of the topography, tracing the director and his wife’s journey into territories cinematically and cartographically coded as

“remote” and “savage.” On the other pole of the West/Rest divide is Louis de Carbonnat’s 1923 adaptation of Le Tour de la France par Deux Enfants: a story widely taught in French primary schools due to its patriotic themes and utility in creating a sense of national identity. Here, the animated lines of the map trace the journey of two brothers from Lorraine, traversing the

provinces of France in search of relatives. In both cases, the map has the straightforward function

of establishing the place for the cinematic action, although this function is ideologically coded by

the associations given to that place in the text of the film. The animating line is essential in each

case, and it serves complimentary functions: in the former film, graphically delineating an

outward trajectory; in the latter, marking a path that leads inward, toward the center of the frame.

Sébastien Caquard’s “Foreshadowing Contemporary Digital Cartography” traces a

progression from such early instances of cine-maps as these to more cinematographically-

processed maps that begin to take on the functions and iconography of the digital maps we are

familiar with today. Fritz Lang’s M from 1931 is a major turning point, as it features a map that

contains multiple elements that anticipate the look and functionality of modern digital

cartography, including embedded “photo real” images in a topographic space, integrated sound

(voiceover), and shifting perspectives (between aerial and oblique or “perspective militaire”). All

this occurs in the context of a scene in which the police search perimeter for the titular child

murderer is drawn on the map by a compass rose operated by an unseen hand. The photo-real

element here—presaging the spatial logic of digital displays like Google Maps Streetview—is a superimposed shot of M’s last crime scene, rising in slight relief from the center of the two- dimensional, paper map. In contrast to the route-tracing maps of the silent-era films, “this map is no longer about the journey, but about measurement and spatial analysis” (49). The mapping scenes in M represent one of the last major developments in screen infographics to take place entirely within the cinema. The use of zoom-effects to change the scale of a map appears a decade later, with Casablanca, and the first maps with real-time updating indicator lights appear

in 1964, adorning the war room in Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. However, these latter two examples emerge in an era in which television has already moved much further into the territory

of an integrated, motion-inflected infographic space, effectively leaving the cinema behind when

it comes to new innovations.

Caquard’s analyses serve as a reminder that it is not the computer as such that gives our

everyday digital maps their particular appearance so much as it is the adaptation of the functions

and features of the infographic page to the more dynamic space and greater capacity for

independent motion afforded by moving-image screens. The particular instances in Caquard’s study also call attention to the connection between the spatial operations of mapping and state power, as in every instance the map occurs in conjunction with a depiction of state violence in the form of warfare or policing. Along these lines, the map and the globe became the most common infographic visual tropes in the newsreel genre during its 50 or so years as a relevant format. Invented in 1908 by the Pathé brothers’ company (who also produced Le Tour de La

France…), the newsreel flourished during the first and second World Wars and served as the immediate conceptual and visual precursor to modern television news. Though the most appealing aspect of the newsreel genre was the immediacy it provided to news coverage through the use of direct footage, newsreels also brought some of the last significant innovations in cartographic cinema. Mark Harrower’s 2004 article “A Look at the History and Future of

Animated Maps” discusses one of the first examples of a fully hand-drawn, frame-by-frame animated map. This map appears in a newsreel clip produced by the Walt Disney Company depicting the 1939 German invasion of Warsaw (35). A relatively expensive and labor-intensive technique, full-animation of infographics was used extensively and to great effect in Disney’s later propaganda feature, Victory through Air Power (1943). The film, financed by Walt Disney himself, was an adaptation of Alexander Seversky’s military treatise of the same name which advocated for aerial superiority as the key to successfully waging an interhemispheric campaign

in World War II. Although straightforward in its argument, the film unfolds in an incredibly complex, hybridized information space, with continually shifting perspectives and animation techniques. Realistically-animated airplanes, ships, and weapons of war weave in and out of maps, schematics, and cartograms, with Seversky himself occasionally stepping out in front of the back-projected animation space to point at the screen and provide commentary. Victory through Air Power was the most ambitious and impactful use of the infographic screen of its time, reportedly leaving a lasting impression on both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt.

However, much of what seemed groundbreaking about the infographic visual style of Victory through Air Power was only groundbreaking in the context of the cinema. The integrated infographic space it presented—with its continuous intertwining of the properties of screen space and graphic print space—was already being explored under technically and financially humbler circumstances by a medium that was still, at the time, an unknown quantity.

II. Infographic Television

The maturation of graphic screen space from reductively cartographic to fully infographic does not take place within the cinema, and can instead be traced back to experimental television.

Experimental television comprises the engineering tests and noncommercial television broadcasts that began in the 1920s and continued with occasional interruptions and setbacks until after the Second World War. The suite of technologies behind television broadcasting was not the work of a single inventor so much as it developed through numerous competing or unconnected projects. Among the most important figures in the technological development of mechanical and electronic television were the American Philo Farnsworth, Russian-American

Vladimir Zworykin, Japanese Kenjiro Takayanagi, and the Scotsman John Logie Baird. In the

context of American television, broadcasting officially began in 1928 with a series of RCA transmissions out of New York’s W2XBS experimental station. Relatively few television receivers were purchased or even commercially available during the experimental period, limiting the audience of these broadcasts to a privileged, and technologically savvy minority; however, it was during this period that television genres and programming conventions first began to take shape. We can thus look to this period as a preparatory phase in electronic media, in which the electronic screen’s capabilities are explored and its visual repertoire created in anticipation of its being introduced to a viewing public.

The connections between television, infographics, and print media can be traced back much further than the experimental period. In the mid-nineteenth century, the work that would

eventually lead to television was conceptualized in terms of the reproduction of images across

long distances. In the 1840s, prior to the development of moving pictures, this would have

primarily taken the form of systems for replicating print materials. Such systems included

Alexander Bain’s 1843 “electric printing telegraph,” which could replicate graphic signs over

wire transmission, and later wireless systems capable of transmitting entire newspapers to a

printing-receiver. These print transmissions are an essential part of the prehistory of television,

which is an image transmission technology as much as it a technology of the moving image. As

Jennifer Light’s “Facsimile: A Forgotten New Medium” reminds us, “prior to 1900, there was no

distinction between fax and television” due to the fact that “both were machines for transmitting

pictures over distances, and engineers were unconcerned as to whether these pictures were

evanescent or permanent, moving or still (which helps to explain why television and facsimile

developers often were one and the same)” (373, n.11). Television’s development into a moving picture technology happened much later and followed a very different course from that of other

moving-picture technologies. The fundamental breakthrough that made electronic, motion- picture television possible was the Cathode Ray Tube, first developed in Germany by Karl

Ferdinand Braun in 1897: the same year that Guglielmo Marconi patented the radio and founded the Wireless Telegraph and Signal Company, and also the year that British physicist J.J.

Thomson succeeded in estimating the charge-to-mass-ratio of the electron. The CRT consists of a vacuum tube containing an electron beam firing-mechanism and a phosphorescent screen. The vacuum allows electrons to be directed along predictable paths to the screen; electrons striking the screen produces visible points of illumination. CRT technology would not see any practical application in the field of television for another forty years, and even then, the CRT display was still primarily conceptualized as an alternative to graphic, print media. For example, the Allen

DuMont Laboratories’ “Non-Technical Discussion of the Cathode-Ray Tube” (1948) describes the CRT as “a convenient and practical method for obtaining precise information in visual form,” in virtue of which “the need for hand-plotted graphs, made from point-to-point investigations, is eliminated” (1).

Television’s origin as a graphic-facsimile medium is one of a few factors that may have contributed to its formative position within the history of the infographic screen. Another was the close association between television engineering and information theory in the early twentieth century. Before it became popularly associated with entertainment and generically figured as an extension of the cinema, television was envisioned as an information medium in two senses. In the first sense, television was, like the fax machine from which it originated, intended to convey visual information, in a more graphic than photographic sense. Whereas the cinema had been commonly imagined as possessing a deep, quasi-spiritual connection with reality via its ability to capture a living image, television was conceptualized from the beginning in terms of message

compression and the language of printing and copying. For example, Vladimir Zworykin’s

Electronics of Image Transmission from 1940 figures the resolution of the television image in

relation to newsprint reprography:

Advantage is taken of the finite resolving power of the eye and of the persistence of

vision in order to make possible the transmission of pictures over a single channel.

Because of the limited resolving power of human sight, a given picture can convey only a

finite amount of information. In other words, if a picture is considered as made up of

small elements of area, each uniform in brightness, there is a limit beyond which any

further decrease in size and increase in number of elements no longer improves the

picture... It is a fact that is made use of in all half-tone printing processes. (161)

In the same text, Zworykin also wrote about television as an information medium in the other

sense: in the sense of an instrument for mass education. He believed that television’s primary

effect on “our standard of living” would stem from its “educational value” which would surpass

that of radio due to the fact that “information can be more easily assimilated” visually than

through sound alone (629). The rather optimistic view that television would be an informational

rather than entertainment medium was shared by many early commentators, including inventor

and television scientist Allen Dumont. In his 1949 article for the Chicago Daily Tribune,

Dumont speculated that television “until now [had] specialized in entertainment chiefly because

such programming offered the quickest possible transition from experimental to commercial

status,” but that the future of the industry lay “in the non-entertainment fields.” Dumont’s sense of television as an information medium is based on a perceived opposition between the inherent commerciality of film and the supposedly more edifying emergent genres of television:

Immediately at hand we have the educational potentialities of television in evidence.

Those excellent documentary films which have enjoyed relatively little circulation in the

past, for example, are now coming into their own on television programs. Travels films,

industrial science, historical governmental and other films—barred by movie houses

because they instruct rather than entertain, and movie admissions are paid to relieve

rather than work the brain—now have an adequate and appreciative audience via

telecasting.

Beyond the circulation of civilian information, though, Dumont is particularly interested in television’s potential as an information medium in service of national defense. “Early television fans,” he writes, “will recall the civilian defense instructions made available in the New York area at the start of our participation in World War II.” “It is no secret,” he goes on to say “that if we should become involved in another war overnight mass training of civilians will be possible via television” (G8). While in some ways unrecognizable to the contemporary observer of television, Dumont’s views on the medium are largely shaped by television’s evolution during

World War II: an event that all but halted the progress of television technology and overwhelmingly affected the form of television content. Though this wartime vision of television gradually faded away during the commercial era that followed, its most enduring aftereffects can be found in one particular genre, the genre of television news. A wartime, infographic genre in every sense, TV news is where television begins to intersect with the territory of the newsreel and propaganda film in terms of the kind of social training and conditioning they facilitate; however, due to its association with print and informational media among other factors, the outcome will be visually and spatially far-removed from any existing genres of the moving image.

III. Television News: The First Fully Infographic Genre

Television news comes into existence at the crossroads between a photographically or

naturalistically-inflected screen that shows us images occupying a world of people and things

and a digital, infographic screen that shows us images occupying a world of abstract information.

The ancestors of the television news format include a wide variety of print and audiovisual

media and performative genres, many of which previously had little to do with the cinema or the

moving image as such. Erkki Huhtamo’s “Screen Test: Why Do We Need an Archeology of the

Screen?” describes the widely forgotten pre-cinematic genre of the Bönkelsong as “a popular

form of visual storytelling—like the shadow theater and the moving panorama” dating as far

back as 17th century Europe. The Bänkelsänger “was a wandering entertainer-newscaster, whom numerous illustrations depict standing on a scaffold, pointing at a large sheet of pictures, and interpreting them.” “The presentations,” Huhtamo writes, “combined current affairs with

sensationalist and moralistic accounts of catastrophes, wars, murders, illicit love affairs, and so

on” (147). Television news initially resembled such a lecture-narrative format, augmented by

some of the same cartographic image-forms found in early cinema. In the 1930s, Donald H.

Monroe, Chief Television Production Manager at the British Broadcasting Corporation was

asked to make some remarks on what type of content seemed to get the best reaction from British

television audiences, for the benefit of American producers trying to replicate his success.

Monroe warned against losing the audience’s attention by televising long speeches, but made

exceptions for “garden talks… with the speaker using blackboard and chalk to illustrate the

trick” and also spoke highly of the “news map” format, in which “an artist is seen doing-in the

drawing while an expert talks on the news from a geographic angle” (qtd. in Dunlap 1947, 52).

The map was, for obvious reasons, a favorite explanatory device for television commentators

covering the war. Dunlap recalls watching “a highly interesting and informative television

program” called “Face of the War” in which the host’s “analysis of the battle news was

supported by maps, coupled with pure discussion and good reasoning” (56). As one of the few

stylistic linkages between the television news format and the newsreel as a form of cartographic

cinema, maps remain ubiquitous features in the visual iconography of television news.

While incredibly novel at the time of its inception, the television news genre has remained rigidly consistent for more than half a century, even as its screen space has migrated to newer media technologies. As Dean Cummings writes in “DNA of a Television News Story,” the basic generic components of television news have “not structurally changed since the beginning”

(203). In How to Watch TV News, Neil Postman and Steve Powers describe the typical television news presentation as revolving around the orchestration of “graphics that tell the viewer what is being shown, or maps and charts that suddenly appear on the screen and disappear on cue,” all of which, rather than being “purely technical matters,” effectuate “the imposition of an orderly world—called ‘the news’—upon the disorderly flow of events” (110-111). According to Michael

Griffin, typical news coverage breaks an event into “segments with corroborating

‘representative’ images” as opposed to “visual ‘documentaries’ of ongoing activity.” While the

newsreel form revolved around the presentation of direct footage, television news

“systematically avoids” this kind of “direct visual ‘coverage’ of events” in favor of a contained and pre-processed presentation of often numerical information, represented by an array of uniquely televisual infographic forms (136).

Magdalena Wojcieszak explains in her “Taxonomy of Iconic, Linguistic, and Audio

Messages in Television News,” “visual critics have mainly analyzed still photographs in

newspapers and magazines, elucidating the evolution and functions of images in the press,”

but not many attempts have been made to undertake the same kind of analysis “with regard to television news images” (459-60).14 Margaret Morse was among the first critics to point out

the fact that TV News visuals are categorically “different from photos in a newspaper with an iconic and indexical reference to the world” in that they “are not based on the ‘realism’ of a space rendered as an optical analogue of the visible world, a perspectival space which began

with the Renaissance” (70). Morse’s elucidation of the “anti-realist” aesthetic at the core of

contemporary news presentation paints a vivid picture of the extent to which the infographic

permeates this visual form:

Far from being a rationalized view of space, news visuals are a collage of items of

incongruent types and scales co-existing within the television frame. Furthermore, the

visual and/or aural presence of a narrating personality is all-pervasive, again with the

brief exception of the “sound bite” in a field report where the world seems to speak for

itself. The visuals within the frame (the logos, the news set, the visuals from “outside”)

generally have a loosely symbolic relation to the world “out there.” For example, in the

animated logos which introduce the news, the magical appearance of abstract shapes

gradually takes on the gestalt of letters of the alphabet and symbols, seen in a perspective

and scale often impossible in “real life.” These animated logos are a combination of

rational, literate modes and the dream logic of primary process in which objects combine

and transform themselves and in which words become “things.” The news set itself,

visible behind the anchor in his opening salutation and in a tell story, shows the

“speaking subject” against an abstract map or bank of monitors used as “wallpaper.”

Though verbal announcements and titles may indicate a city, the set signifies a “national

nowhere” of narration somewhere out of and above the world. The hanging box insert

over the right or left shoulder of the anchor in a “tell” story usually frames a symbol

connected with the story topic. This symbol (piles of coins or a dollar, for instance, for

stories on interest, the exchange rate, or rising building costs) bears an arbitrary relation

to the visible world and a far more direct relation to the symbolic system of our culture

with its labelings and groupings. (70)

Morse points out that while some of the images that contextualize TV news stand-up shots appear to be “more patently referential” than others, deeper inspection typically reveals that even visual backdrops such as “the White House, Capitol Hill, farm field, or overlook of Jerusalem”

function in terms of their iconicity rather than their actualized relationships with physical space

and temporal eventhood. Morse notes that a reporter “must leave ‘the scene’ itself… in order to

locate himself ‘symbolically’” (71); in terms of framing, this means he must move away from the

object of interest enough that it can fit within the space of the screen in a way that triggers the

graphic function, showing itself as a traceable outline, an identifiable façade, etc. In this sense,

even photographic elements within the visual space of television news take on an infographic

function. The shift between cartographic cinema and infographic television thus involves a

complete restructuring and reconceptualization of screen space. To understand the mechanisms

of this transformation will require taking a closer look at the origins of television news in the

moment the format first diverged from the newsreel and from cinematic visual models as such.

IV. CBS News, 1941-1949

CBS-TV provides the best case study of the evolution of infographic screenspace in

early television news for several reasons. They were the first American network and one of the

first networks worldwide to provide regular news broadcasts; they placed tremendous

emphasis on infographic visualization, both from a production design perspective and, at

times, even a theoretical perspective. Despite having an extremely limited audience, their

World War II-era broadcasts pioneered visual-rhetorical techniques and ways of managing

space that proliferate and persist throughout the entire history of television news, eventually

impacting audiences around the world. Faced with the exigence of America’s entry into World

War II and a lack of available newsreel footage to cover this event,15 “the television

department improvised with the materials at their disposal by concentrating on maps, symbols,

drawings, animations, and still photographs” (Conway 2009, 71).

According to Mike Conway’s “The Birth of CBS-TV News: An Ambitious

Experiment at the Advent of U.S. Commercial Television,” CBS’s major innovations in the field of televised news began immediately after Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7th of 1941. Prior to the winter of 1941, CBS-TV was an experimental enterprise of relatively limited scope, but the attack itself propelled their news programming into a state of rapid acceleration. Having hitherto only covered the war effort on its European front, the station was not equipped to cover such a catastrophic event taking place in the south Pacific. In response, the news crew “started working on a new set that would reflect the expanded global scope of the war,” a set featuring “nine geographic regions, including a huge map of the world that measured sixteen feet long by five feet high” (Conway 2006, 135). Among the nine regions, the most important for that evening’s broadcast was the newly constructed

Pacific Ocean map, with which anchor Richard Hubbell could point out “key locations between Hawaii and Japan” and use moveable ship icons “to visualize the latest information on the location of the U.S. Pacific Fleet” (135). The introduction of moveable icons already foreshadows the coming innovation of movement and transformation from within the graphic

itself. Television at this moment was not involved in giving a convincing representation of

the world but rather in fabricating a schematic system of visual information, supplemented

with embedded photographs that simulate the macro and micro levels of temporal events (a

battle, a works project, an assembly, a etc.) and spatial settings (a city, a country, a continent,

etc.). Dunlap gives an account of the style of Hubbell’s newscasts on the WCBS-TV news

program:

As he read press association bulletins, he pointed to various centers of interest on

the map. Further taking advantage of television for illustrating the news, the camera

occasionally switched to pictures. For instance, with the report of the sinking of the

aircraft carrier Lexington in the Battle of the Coral Sea, a photograph of the ship

was televised; and when plans for an oil pipeline up the Mississippi Valley were

talked about, the route was traced on a map and pictures showed the digging of such

a ditch. (59)

Even at this rudimentary stage, the newscast already embodied a distinct mixed-media

form oriented around spatial graphics, and the act of tracing, a simple form of animation,

foreshadowed the more autonomous infographic composites to come in the year ahead.

Conway’s description of the program’s set design—more detailed than Dunlap’s

firsthand account—reveals how the shifting, planar space of television was able to find

its own infographic analogues for the techniques of other visual media without

duplicating them:

At first glance, the WCBW news set looked like a geography classroom. Huge maps

took up most of the background of the set, almost overpowering Richard Hubbell as he

read the latest news into the camera. The wooden backdrop behind Hubbell consisted

of three large maps, each roughly ten feet in height and four feet wide. Each map panel

could be flipped over to reveal a different view. … The front side had a view of the

battle area, much like a long shot in film language. When Hubbell would rotate the

map, the other side would feature a closer view of the particular day’s fighting, akin to

a close-up in film editing. (66)

Conway’s recourse to the cinema as a metaphor for the operations of the set perhaps unintentionally obscure the uniqueness of this arrangement within the history of screen space up to this point; unlike film, in which long and close shots appear ex nihilo as they are needed, the camera-shot analogues here loom in the background even before they are called upon, visually representing, as the background action of the busy newsroom will in future broadcasts, the inexhaustible tide of information. Yet more so than film, the panels are reminiscent of individual photographs in a print layout, which can coexist on a surface irrespective of their individual scales, or perhaps of graphic insets. Further, the way the images rotate, appear, and change position within the larger visual layout is less similar to any

existing form of onscreen space than it is to contemporary web design.

The centrality of the graphic to the CBS news format was a direct consequence of the

ongoing crisis of World War II, which transformed distant spaces into immediate matters of

concern and catalyzed an outpouring of infographic constructions capable of visualizing the

abstract dimensions of a large and multivariate conflict. Richard Hubbell himself described his

show as “television’s first, up-to-the-minute, visualized news service, stressing the geographical aspect of the world-encircling war and America’s position in it” (qtd. in Conway

2009, 68). The overarching goal of Hubbell and the other staff members was to create intelligible, infographic syntheses capable of standing in for the complex international

situation. The news crew focused on the fabrication of “graphics [that] could be created on short notice,” using, for example, “a Nazi symbol or a hammer and sickle along with thick lines and arrows” to represent the fighting taking place on the eastern front (68). The symbols not only made the task of prop design easier—they were reusable—but also condensed the complicated realities of the conflict into the more comprehensible form of simple shapes, each representing national ideologies, human bodies, and industrial material, moving to-and-fro on a two-dimensional surface. As in other areas of infographic optimization, efficiency was the order of the day; show developer Henry Cassirer found the program’s first maps to be too

“crowded with information” such that on the “crude cameras, not to mention the small, hazy television screens of 1944,” they looked to the viewer’s like “a confusing blur of lines and words” (94). The solution was to drastically reduce the visual density of these graphic spaces.

Larger and less detailed maps meant a more efficient, more codified message with less semantic openness (tending towards monosemy), less distraction, and greater visibility. The standard procedure of the broadcasts was then altered so that instead of the anchor himself pointing to areas of interest on the map, a separate camera shot would capture a pointer moving across the map, operated by an unseen hand (Cassirer’s) (107). The news anchor, from this point on, was no longer the force directing the viewer’s gaze and manipulating the representations on screen; this task was now carried out by unseen servants, spontaneously responsive to the broadcast script. With the human figure receding from view, the screen was moving closer to functioning as an autonomous graphic space. Since the maps and visual aids would therefore be occupying a separate part of the set from then on, the space just behind

Hubbell’s desk was now occupied by another graphic object: a circular map of the world, presided over by the CBS logo (107).

After the war ended, CBS’s graphic ensembles expanded to encompass representations of a greater range of everyday phenomena while also reflecting the studio’s intensifying efforts towards information compression and simplification. A new artistic director, Chester

Burger, applied his military experience operating an “information and education program for new recruits” to the developing news infographic form. His former job had required him to teach a basic overview of the political situation surrounding the war in a very short time to soldiers who had little or no education on the subject of global politics (147). It was from these experiences of simplifying and abstracting complexities that Burger developed his methodology for visualizing the news. “Each visualization must be reduced to the simplest possible form, without extraneous elements,” Burger wrote, “so that the pictorial representation can be grasped quickly.” A sophisticated system of orchestrating images, text, animation, gesture, and the voice, such that each reinforces and circumscribes the meaning of the others began to take shape. Graphics finally achieved a total autonomy of movement via the “bretzicon” animator, which used mirrors and the “manual skill” of the operator to give the appearance of self-animating visuals (112). “To create motion,” explains Rudy Bretz, “the people operating the animator wore black gloves and added, subtracted, or moved the symbols with the viewer seeing only the motion and not the hands” (qtd. in Conway 2009, 110). Going a step beyond Cassirer’s offscreen hand, the bretzicon provides the illusion of visuals that change of their own accord. The bretzicon was supplemented with another device called a balopticon, a type of slide projector, which was installed in order “to solve the problem of how to switch from one piece of artwork to another while live on the air” (187). With the balopticon, a succession of photographs, charts, drawings, or even a rudimentary animation

created by successive images of a single action could be integrated into the live broadcast in a

frame within the frame, completing the effect of a totally infographic screen space.

V. Visualization: How Information Restructures Screen Space

During the period of the experimental CBS News broadcasts, a term emerged which figures heavily in contemporaneous discourses surrounding the televisual transformation of infographic space: “visualization.” The entry of this word into the lexicon of image-

production heralds a massive conceptual shift. Visualization can refer to both a process and a

product; we can speak of either the visualization of information through graphs, maps, and

diagrams, or of a visualization (a map, graph, diagram, etc.). In either case, visualization depends upon the uniquely 20th century concept of information as an autonomous substance:

there must be this stuff called information—existing independently of any one person’s state-

of-being-informed— before it becomes possible to imagine the invisibility of information, and by the same token, the possibility of lending visibility to information. Furthermore, the precise nature of information-stuff is what determines the novelty of visualization. Because information is conceived as a non-medium-specific, communicable quantity, visualization must be understood as an instantiation and not an adaptation. Information, unlike text or speech, can be instantiated in natural languages, artificial codes, organic patterns, etc., and also images. To adapt a spoken idea into an image or a textual passage into an image is not the same as to visualize information, as the former process finds analogical means among disparate forms to realize a similar spirit or “content,” while the latter takes an intelligible content germane to no medium in particular and allows it to dictate the creation of a visual object. The information visualized may originate in numbers, words, strings of letters or

symbols; it may end up in the same form, a different one, or a hybridized variation: numbers to animated numbers, words to ideograms, letter-strings to symbols on a three dimensional shape.

If visualizations do not adapt, neither do they illustrate. Even though the very same infographic might appear in a newspaper and news broadcast on a given day, everything from the balance and interplay of other media surrounding the graphic to the normative styles of viewer/reader engagement called upon by its appearance will differ. Comparing the two terms etymologically, we find that the oldest sense of the term “illustration” suggests rays of light issuing from the sun, bringing clarity and definition down from a celestial source. The root of

“visual” contrastingly points to the beams that issue from the eyes in the extramission theory of sight that was upheld in classical and medieval thought. Whereas the illustration is outside of the text, enhancing it, the visualization is understood as issuing from within the stream of information, materializing it. The visual appears everywhere one looks and nowhere else, while the illustration always points to what is beyond it. Whereas an illustration by definition brings an image to a text as a supplement, a visualization presents an image that functions in the manner of a text. To visualize means ostensibly to take something that is non-visual and make it visual. To illustrate is to illuminate the textual by adorning it with the pictorial.

“Illustrate” in the more modern sense of the word comes into use in the early 16th century

(according to the OED), concurrent with the invention of etching as a printing technique to reproduce engraved pictures. Only with the advent of a specific technology for reproducing images in print material does the term get extended, for a picture is no longer just a picture when it is defined by its relation to text, and a new terminology is required which can incorporate the sense of belonging to a relation with language into the concept of a picture.

Similarly, “visualization” before the decade of television’s invention refers exclusively to the

mental process of picturing an idea in one’s own imagination. The term’s extension

accompanies the advent of scientific imaging technologies as well as the advent of television,

because a picture precipitated out of information is no longer just an illustration, any more than an illustration illuminating text is reducible to a picture. Indeed, the picture that precipitates out of information is a much more peculiar proposition to contemplate, one whose strangeness often goes unappreciated due to its penchant for blending in with the visual forms of the past. The operation of information visualization is as fundamental to the present era as illumination was to the era of the manuscript codex, both technically and epistemologically.

Television, as the name implies, was conceived of as a mechanism for generalized

visibility—a technology to make things visible without being in their presence, thus making

all things potentially available for viewing. It should come as no surprise then that the process

of information visualization should be one of the medium’s original uses. Significantly,

visualization is the word that comes up most frequently in the parlance of the original CBS

news team to describe both the process of creating new visually-oriented materials and the composited images that result from this process. Burger, whose official job title on CBS news included the word “Visualizer,” goes so far as to claim that “satisfactory visualization” is the key to any successful TV news broadcast. In Burger’s words, visualization was the essential factor that made news on television “different in concept than either the radio news program or the movie newsreel” (qtd. in Conway 2009, 150). It’s also a term that is directly intertwined with the broader history of television. OED citations suggest that “visualization” before the decade of television’s invention was used to refer exclusively to the mental process of picturing an idea in one’s own imagination. Similarly, the use of the word “visual” as a noun,

as in the phrase “news visual,” dates back to a 1951 issue of British Kinematography, and all

other OED-cited uses of the term from the 1950s and early 60s are direct references to

television. However, the connection between visualization and information is more than a

mere correlation. Visualization is one of the chief operations of the information concept as it

pertains to culture, and television is, in an almost definitive way, the medium through which

visualization comes into the world.

In Information, Crisis, Catastrophe, Mary Ann Doane briefly touches upon the unique connection between television and visualization in her discussion of the optics of

information:

Television knowledge strains to make visible the invisible. While it acknowledges the

limits of empiricism, the limitations of the eye in relation to knowledge, information is

nevertheless conveyable only in terms of a simulated visibility—“If it could be seen,

this is what it might look like.” Television deals in potentially visible entities. The

epistemological endeavor is to bring to the surface, to expose, but only at a second

remove—depicting what is not available to sight. (254)

What Doane describes as television’s aesthetic of the potentially visible forms part of the ethos of visualization. Visualization treats idea and extension as interchangeably subordinated to the rubric of data through the absenting of spatio-semantic distinctions. This is to say that whatever can be said within a knowledge-oriented discourse and whatever can be seen are both visualized in the same manner, through the technology of the graphic- ensemble. Television, in turn, is as culturally and technologically invested in broadcasting never-present views as it is in broadcasting not-present ones, particularly when it comes to the microscopic object, the hypothetical object, the occurrence happening in many places at

once or over long stretches of time: aggregate, average, probability, etc. By incorporating

information-objects into its visual repertoire, television commands not only the view of

distant places and times (seeing-at-a- distance), but also phenomena that are infinitely distant

in that there exists no real, human perspective from which they could be viewed. To this aim,

television invents (or reinvents) visualization as its technology for showing the

communicable-but-invisible side of information.

Conclusion: Infographic Space and the “Piano Nobile” of Digital Information

Through television, and later the computer screen, visualization becomes a vehicle for the universal expansion of infographic space. In visualized infographic space, even the photographic image is framed by a non-representational graphic matrix in which free-floating elements interact

according to a purely informatic visual logic. The graphic screen space that thus gets created in

early television continues to hold sway over the conventional interfaces with digital information

up to the present time. Shifting our focus from the televisual to the computational screen, let us

finally consider how this graphic screen space that originates from television fits within the

larger domain of 21st century information space: a space that can be said to exist simultaneously

within, alongside of, and in place of real physical space. Albert Borgmann’s Holding onto

Reality (1999) divides information into three functionally different prepositional categories:

information about, for, and as reality. Natural signs such as landmarks as well as cultural signs

that serve the same function (basic maps, street signs, etc.) are about reality in the sense that they

disclose something pertinent to the world as it is. Blueprints, recipes, and instruction manuals

introduce another order of information that is for reality, meaning it engages not with real entities

but with potential conditions that become realized only through the application of the

information in practice. The third category, which comes to prominence in the present “age of information,” describes information that can take the place of the thing it informs about, becoming, for all intents and purposes, a surrogate realization of the thing itself, as the information on a digital audio recording might be to the musical performance it captured.

Borgmann’s history of information in the third sense tells the familiar story of modernity’s grids and clocks producing a new, more reliable and surveyable version of reality that can then be documented and even replicated: an “ability to see things in a new way” that precipitated

“ordering them in a new way as well” (80). The problem that arises amidst this new order is partially one of competing ambiguities. Pre-information reality is ambiguous because of its mysterious otherness: the sense that one can never fully grasp the depth and complexity of the external world. Information-mediated reality, on the other hand, introduces an “ambiguity of austerity” in the way that it necessarily underdetermines what it represents (113). Digitization and other forms of information abstraction create a convincing alternative to reality that is nevertheless intrinsically lacking the infinite depth of the world because of the very image-to- symbol reduction that is information’s sole operation.

A vast space thus emerges which is the visible correlate to what philosopher Luciano

Floridi calls the “infosphere”: “the whole informational environment constituted by all informational entities, their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations… an environment comparable to, but different from, cyberspace, which is only one of its sub- regions” (2014, 39). For Borgmann, the dimensions of such a space are quickly becoming impossible to contemplate:

Information technology… has enlarged the space of our choices to an extent where it

has lost all structure and resistance. Today's paradigmatic field of possibilities is not

circumscribed by six or so octaves and twelve keys, nor is it a magic window of two or

four or eight segments. It is more like the standard computer screen of the early

nineties that had 640 times 480 pixels. Each pixel could have any one of 256 colors.

Thus the screen has 256640×480 or 1.3 × 107398 differs possible states. Given that there

are “only” about 1078 protons and neutrons in the entire visible universe, the number of

possible screen states is unimaginably large. (Borgmann 139)

Mapping thus becomes a fundamental procedure once society enters into information space, because, “in order to obtain and maintain information about the shape of the world as a whole one needs to proceed from the internal space of memory to an external space of signs” (139).

Floridi describes the contemporary relationship with this vast infosphere as comparable to “a classic Renaissance house” in which humans inhabit the “piano nobile,” disconnected from and oblivious to the subterranean levels where machine-facilitated information production and exchange goes on, producing the epiphenomena that constitute everyday digital experiences (37). Information space is stratified into layers, with lower tiers of activity typically black-boxed to the consumer of information, or in the case of television news, specularized and conventionalized as an ever-present backdrop. From this perspective, one might argue that the visualizations of graphic space that began to colonize our electronic screens after the CBS wartime broadcasts phenomenologically prepared viewers for the experience of dwelling in the upper-levels of information space. Further, their direct connection to the earlier spatial construction of infographics reveals something crucial about our relatively mystifying relationship with this space. It reveals that even before the space of information signified for us a vast domain of arcane, machinic processes taking place outside of our field of vision, we were already accustomed to visuals that opened onto a world of

potentially infinite non-physical objects and processes only partially manifested in the screen

or page that intersects its two-dimensional superstratum. The hidden space of information

processes was already known to us in the age of television as the implicit informatic world at

the horizon of infographic space.

However, the real problem with Floridi’s piano nobile schema is that the infographic

image is not the epiphenomenal manifestation of something computers do behind the scenes.

As I have demonstrated, there is a 20th century technology of the infographic that arises out of

a set of techniques which refit the infographic to the parameters of the moving image. This is a

visual and conceptual technology, though, and while it finds innumerable uses in the context

of the computer interface, its origins lie elsewhere. Infographics are a form of visual data-

processing, and in that sense, they exist at the same level of reality as the hidden components

of computing machines. The space they create is layered in a planar sense, but the screen they

occupy is not hiding anything behind it. At the same time, this is not to say that infographic

space is transparent. “Transparency of information would approach perfection if all

information about reality could be united in one well-ordered information space,” writes

Borgmann, expressing the ambitious telos implicit to infographic space. “Transparency, however,” he continues, “is anything but transparent and casts its own shadows of enigma and confusion” (175). The ordering principles of “well-ordered” infospace form one such shadow: giving the appearance of universal and autonomous conventions that arise from the operations of the data machine when they are in fact particular and borrowed, historically contingent and not neutral in their effects. Recalling the ways in which infographic space developed before and outside of the history of computer graphics reminds us of the fabricated and mutable nature of information space. It exists in a hypothetical rational moment of unambiguous

expression yet gets mobilized precisely as a response to ambiguous situations. It expurgates the visible human body from the space of semiotic construction while expanding the reach of the unseen hand. The connections it shares with particular technologies are both incidental and formative; it is itself a technology that shapes how we view the defining technologies of the current era.

CHAPTER 3: SEMIOTICS OF GRAPHIC SPACE

All human logic appears to be based only on the visual properties afforded only by the x y z construction, that is, on the natural and immediate perception of the relationship among three ‘dimensions.’ Beyond that lies the fourth dimension, time, which is accessible only to human memory.

-Jacques Bertin16

Introduction: Immovable Object

In 1967, Jacques Bertin published Sémiologie Graphique, the first comprehensive attempt

to theorize graphic information. The exigence for the work stemmed from the innovation of

computer graphics, which introduced new and complex ways of visualizing information that

would require a systematic understanding of the existing principles. In the introduction to

Sémiologie, Bertin wrote that the migration of graphics from the printed page to “electronic displays, such as the cathode ray tube” would “open up an unlimited future to graphics” (2).

Nevertheless, he unwittingly suggests that graphic information does indeed have a limit—a limit

that we could call “cinema.” Bertin’s graphic semiology decisively excludes “real movement”

and “real time” from consideration, and his justification for this decision explicitly points to the

properties of the cinematic image:

This study does not include all types of visual perception, and real movement is

specifically excluded from it. An incursion into cinematographic expression very quickly

reveals that most of its laws are very different from the laws of atemporal drawing.

Although movement introduces only one additional variable, it is an overwhelming one;

it so dominates perception that it severely limits the attention which can be given to the

meaning of the other variables. Furthermore, it is almost certain that real time is not

quantitative; it is ‘elastic.’ (42).

Although the most promising prospect offered by new electronic displays was the real-time visualization of information, this did not mean that time itself could be figured into the semiology of the graphic ensemble. To the contrary, any set of semantic rules that might govern the visualization of information in stasis no longer apply when the infographic image is considered from the perspective of cinematic temporality.

The “overwhelming” nature of movement does more than place the analysis of motion graphics outside the scope of Bertin’s project: it fundamentally complicates the epistemology of

the graphic screen. The cinema screen—along with many of its electronic successors—is

inextricably linked to movement and temporality. Cinema began with the moving image and

over time developed unique strategies for visually and sonically realizing immediate

temporalities.17 Although the cinema’s relationship with time is determined by the artistic

innovations of particular filmmakers, the potentialities of cinematic time are conditioned by the

technology of the moving image. Bertin’s point demonstrates something fundamental about the

nature of infographic space in relation to time and the moving image. To understand this, we can

make a comparison between cinema as a visual form uniquely tied to the moving image and

infographics as a visual form uniquely tied to the spatialization of information. As Bertin

explains, infographics produce signs that are not constituted in real time, and in fact his point is

that the infographic sign is disrupted by time. Conversely, when cinema can be said to “produce

signs,” then time is always constitutive of this sign-process. Immobilized/atemporal cinema can no longer be interpreted as cinema, just as a mobilized/temporal graph can no longer be read as a

graph. Intrinsically, the cinematic image contains time, while the graphic image repels it. To be

clear, Bertin is making a point about how these images are understood (received) rather than how

they are presented. A film frame can be analyzed as an artifact or trace of film, but the frame points us back to the sequence or interval, or to the temporalities focused and consolidated within the image itself in the context of a larger cinematic expression. When the frame is totally recontextualized and presented as only a photograph, it loses the connection to the cinematic.

Likewise, infographics do exist in motion, since visual information can be animated like any other visual element. However, animated graphics have to be broken down, turned back into isolable points of difference—or else aggregated into a numerically larger, static representation of change overtime—in order to be understood. Visualized information exists outside of time, in an ideal stasis Bertin refers to as le moment rationnel.18 The atemporal “rational moment” results

from an agreement between the graphist and the interpreter of the graph to abide by a set of

delineated or implied semantic rules. In other words, the rational moment is a theoretical

description of the artificial rhetorical situation which gives infographics their meaning.

This chapter will analyze the rational moment in connection with the broader history of

the production and theorization of infographic space. It will show that this rational moment

constitutes a suspension of flux and of exteriority which allows the infographic to partake of an

artificial monosemy. Following Bertin, I will discuss infographic space in opposition to

cinematic time. There are numerous reasons to compare the infographic with the cinematic

image. Notwithstanding the various screens (and attendant disciplines) that proliferate today, the

cinema screen allows us to think in terms of moving images as they existed just before the arrival

of the electronic screen: just before the proliferation of infographic images to which Bertin’s

project is responding. If we are surrounded by the moving image today, it is fair to say that we

are surrounded by media that internalize and modify the cinematic image. In the case of digital media, they do so in terms of graphics. The relationship between the moving image and the infographic image that will be considered here is predicated on the work of the previous two chapters. The first chapter established the centrality of graphics and the infographic in particular to the concept of the digital image. The second chapter argued that the infographic screen is the key to understanding the proliferation of this digital image in the digital age. This chapter is concerned with theorizing the relationship between the moving image and the infographic image that constitutes the digital screen. In the end, I will argue that this relationship and the tension it produces are precisely what give the digital screen the potential to function as a space for digital aesthetics.

Graphics present a formalization of thought which is systematized in the infographic. The graphic is an image form that makes the visual into a sign-system through the signifying function of the graphic line. All graphics point toward the ideal of the infographic. If we compare the cinema screen to the multiform screens that follow, the latter are distinguished by the dominance of the graphic. In newer media, the graphic line and graphic space determine how we interact with even non-graphical phenomena. The infographic codifying and digitizing of the image takes place at every level of digital media--from the circuit-diagrams that discretize currents in computing machines, to the graphical and binary nature of the pixel, to the graphic language whereby we interface with visual images, sound images, and other graphics. Digital media and digital devices continually present us with images of graphics in motion. Not all of these graphics are infographics, but all belong to the semiology of the infographic. Nevertheless, the semiology of the infographic is incompatible with motion. This means that motion graphics will present potentially unresolvable semiotic problems when we attempt to conceptualize them in a

way that accounts for true movement. The discussion to follow undertakes a philosophical

investigation of the multivalent relations between movement, logic, spatiality, and the graphic

image. The result, I contend, is an unmistakable conclusion: screen graphics are unthinkable. The

screen transposes the graphic in a way that fundamentally unsettles its semantic structure. For

this reason, the semiotics of screen graphics presents an opportunity for thinking through and

thinking against the constraining logic of the digital. In a real way, the digital screen materializes

the problem of the discrete and the continuous, or the analog and the digital, as the primary

subject of aesthetic contemplation. Ultimately, the aim of this chapter is to present the paradox

and unthinkability of screen graphics as an answer to the question: how is a digital aesthetics

possible?

I. A Brief History of the Infographic

Infographic space plays an enormous role in the infrastructure of the visual image today,

but this was not always the case. Before the age of infographics, the graphic existed as a property

of the artistic image, linked to the grapheme, which had a particular kind of signifying potential.

The graphic element in art is emphasized whenever the image or elements of the image begin to

take on discrete sign-functions. The graphic bears information or conveys meaning in a discrete,

digital way; it separates itself off from the virtual and affective elements that otherwise define art. In this sense, the graphic element, wherever it becomes dominant, is at odds with—or complicates—the aesthetic function of art. At the same time, it announces another function, through which the image can come to serve as a repository or processing-machine for information. Prior to the eighteenth century, images possessing a dominant graphic function could be found in architectural drawing, geometry and cartography. The distinction between

these types of technical images and aesthetic images has rarely been clear-cut in the history of image-making. Svetlana Alpers’ The Art of Describing discusses the descriptive function of seventeenth century Dutch painting, in which the canvas came to function “like a map, a surface on which is laid out an assemblage of the world” (122). “Instead of interpretive depth,” the

Dutch painters were concerned with specificity, the enumeration of detail, and the quasi-textual function by way of which a painting could convey precise narrative details without resorting to an external text: a technique of gestural and graphic signification that Alpers dubs “captioning”

(207). Early maps, technical drawings, and descriptive paintings all belong to the first-phase of the graphic sign-function, in which graphic space is represented as coextensive with physical space.

Present-day infographics differ from these examples principally in that they inhabit their own space, with no (necessary) symbolic recourse to the physical world. According to Bertin, the emergence of an autonomous graphic space had to await the realization “that the two dimensions of a sheet of paper could usefully represent something other than visible space” (4). The change from object-representative to infographic space is not merely subtractive; the element that constitutes the spatiality of infographic space—this “other than” to which Bertin refers—is something that had to be invented. Infographic space is a fabricated world in which lines, shapes, and points directly represent, by virtue of their spatial properties, something totally unrelated to physical space: something related instead to numerical data and quantities. Thinking in infographic space requires a massive shift in perspective from the point-of-view that informs naturalistic representation. The history of this paradigm shift is recounted in Edward Tufte’s The

Visual Display of Quantitative Information. In the initial phase of graphic production, cartographic maps came the closest to dissociating themselves from physical space and physical

objects, for the map in its most reduced form is essentially a network of points, in which a single dot can represent an entire city or area of interest irrespective of its size. As a special kind of ordered network, the map long prefigured the arrival of pure infographics without ever signaling a shift in the constitution of represented space. This is because maps also make explicit reference to geographical space; therefore, they do not instigate a rupture in the representational or descriptive space of drawing and painting in the way that more abstract infographics do. Up until the eighteenth century, graphic space lay undiscovered—hidden beneath the ornate and descriptive surfaces of innumerable maps, its potential for abstract representation eluding countless generations of cartographers (Tufte 20).

Tufte cites the isolated example of an eleventh century Chinese engraved map which was the first to feature a full grid (20). Such artifacts occupy a liminal realm between object- representational and information-representational space, making use of planar, graphic space while disguising it under a façade of naturalistic representation. Even four centuries later, “no one had yet made the quantitative abstraction of placing a measured quantity on the map’s surface… let alone the more difficult abstraction of replacing latitude and longitude with some other dimensions.” (22). These developments would eventually take place not in cartography but within the realm of political economics. Tufte credits William Playfair (1759-1823) with being the first to systematically arrange arithmetical data in pictorial space, leading to the development of “nearly all the fundamental graphic designs” (9). Playfair’s statistical graphs were immediately recognized as an important tool for representing information, and later, they gradually came into widespread popular use with the expansion of formal education in the late nineteenth century. According to James Beniger, “graphs of mathematical functions” became common features of textbooks “after 1902,” statistical graphs “appeared about 1910,” and bar

graphs as well as pie charts “were added in the period 1915-1918.” During this period of time,

infographics found their way “through textbooks, college courses, and the mass media—into the

popular domain” (6). The last major development in print graphics before the advent of screen

graphics may have been Otto Neurath’s information-graphical “isotype” system, originally implemented as a pedagogical tool for Vienna’s Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseum in the

1920s. Neurath’s “Vienna Method” isotypes, still in common use today, sought to take advantage of the unique properties of the infographic to break down language and educational barriers. A century and a half after Playfair’s first bar graph, infographics had become a ubiquitous and universally recognizable system of information display.

II. First Formalization of Graphic Space

By the early twentieth century, infographics had become a whole sign system. Projects began to emerge, in disparate disciplines and contexts, towards clarifying the system of infographics through a formalized set of rules and descriptions. Such an effort may be doomed to confusion; Tufte notes that, in practice, infographic design principles are “not logically or mathematically certain” and “should be greeted with some skepticism” (191). However, several generative attempts have been made to formalize and standardize the rules of graphic information, and while each may have its peculiarities and flaws, these systems do point toward some universals of infographics that will be useful for our endeavor. The earliest example of a formal graphic system appears in the papers of C.S. Peirce. Though frequently overlooked,

Peirce’s theory of graphical logic was what he considered the culmination and crowning jewel of his philosophy; in fact, the phrase “My Chef D’Oeuvre” precedes the main text of his unpublished manuscript Existential Graphs. Peirce worked on the idea of the existential graph

system over a number of years, and he continued to add to EG until shortly before his death in

1914. Unlike Bertin’s semiology, Peirce’s work is not a system of graphic information per se but, rather, a system of logic that makes use of the graphic function and graphic space. Rather than seeking to categorize infographic sign-systems, he set out to create his own signs and conventions, which he saw as a solution to the vagaries and indirectness of expression common affecting other formal logics; instead of logical symbols, he sought to create iconic signs connected by a diagrammatic syntax. His contributions to the theorization of graphics come by way of the generalizable insights he gained during his attempts to elucidate a formal logic entirely in diagrammatic notation.

Peirce revised and expanded upon his system’s rules several times, eventually arriving at three distinct formulations of the overall graphical system. The semiotic rules of Peirce’s graphs are grounded in his evolving conceptualization of graphic space. Peirce recognized that while the graphic line exists on the page in a literal sense, it has its meaning in an imaginary space that has to be theorized. This is due to the fact that space is the primary element through which graphics convey meaning. A material piece of paper, with its arbitrary dimensions and potential imperfections, is not where the graphic resides any more than a country house in a landscape painting resides on a piece of canvas. Rather, there is another space to which these images refer.

In Peirce’s graphical project, the principal task is inventing a way of describing a kind of graphic-imaginary space for which no terminology had been invented. In the first iteration of

Peirce’s graph-logic, the page “or blackboard” on which the graphs are inscribed acts as “The

Sheet of Assertion” (para. 396). The sheet of assertion forms a signifying plane that represents the universe of discourse. Any mark made within the designated page will have a definite logical or signifying function in relation to the sheet of assertion. The sheet of assertion also constitutes

a graph in and of itself: “Not only is the sheet itself a graph, but so likewise is the sheet together

with the graph scribed upon it. But if the sheet be blank, this blank, whose existence consists in

the absence of any scribed graph, is itself a graph” (para. 397).

The sheet of assertion is a universe unto itself, but it exists as part of a multiverse of

possible worlds. Peirce introduces a second term, the “Phemic Sheet,” that he uses to discuss the

possibility of other modes of graphic expression besides assertion.19 The sheet of assertion is a

serviceable concept for imagining a universe of descriptive propositions, but it doesn’t leave

room for questions, predictions, etc. Hence. the phemic sheet exists at a greater level of

generality than the sheet of assertion. This generality allows Peirce to make a crucial leap in his

conceptualization of graphic space. The multiverse that Peirce discovers when he begins to think

through all of the possible variations of graphic space corresponds to the logical modes of

thought and expression. The multiverse of graphics is therefore a sort of logical brain: a brain

that operates entirely within systems of logic. Graphic space becomes the space of the mind for

Peirce, not in a fallible, human sense, but in the sense of an inorganic, mechanical mind. Peirce

goes so far as to claim that this sheet functions as a “quasi-mind in which the graphist and

interpreter are at one” (para. 553). Herein lies the appeal of graphical logic for Peirce. By

actualizing logical expressions in a space, Peirce believes that he can overcome the vicissitudes

and vagaries of linguistic representation. The phemic sheet is at once a plane of ideational

content and a sort of imaginary computer or brain which graphically performs the thinking-

through of the logical content on behalf of the writer and reader of the logical expression. It

constitutes a machine that thinks for the writer-reader pair, or synchronizes their thinking across

time and space in a way that ideally negates variance. In the mind-space of the graph, the logical expression thinks through itself on behalf of the two interlocutors.

The phemic sheet exists somewhat independently of the materiality of the page that is its

avatar; nevertheless, the spatial parameters of the sheet echo those of the page. Like the page,

graphic space is two-sided, Peirce imagines the side of the page facing away from the viewer as

grounding a universe with inverse properties to the phemic sheet. The phemic sheet lies “on the

smoother of the two surfaces or sides of a Leaf, this side being called the recto” (para. 555). The

recto is a space of affirmation, while the verso signifies negation. To reveal a negative graph, the

graphist must “make an incision, called a Cut, through the Sheet all the way round the Graph-

instance to be denied, and must then turn over the excised piece, so as to expose its rougher

surface carrying the negatived Graph-instance” (para. 556). A person acting as graphist could

indicate a cut on paper or a blackboard by simply shading an area. Visually setting off some

portion of the physical space activates the cut in the imaginary space. The shading represents the

flipped-over surface of another side of the logical plane: one in which everything on the visible

side is denied. Spatially asserting that something does not exist thus involves creating a portal

between two universes in the imaginary of the graph. One of Peirce’s rules states that “reversing”

the excised piece is a necessary component of making the “cut”; there is no way of opening a

portal to the negative universe without some negative space coming through.

In some logical expressions, portals are established between universes of assertion and

universes of possibility, as when a certain statement that is true has a relationship with a

statement that might be true or will be true. Peirce introduces “tinctures”—indicated in the

physical world by different colors of paper or shading—for the purpose of demarcating different modalities of the phemic sheet. Later, in an “improvement” to his system of tinctures, Peirce contended that the verso side could be the domain of “possibilities of different kinds according to

its tint” (para. 573). The negation universe of the inverse sheet is thus redescribed as a function

of possibility:

To scribe a graph is to impart an item of information; and this item of information does

one of two things. It either adds to what we know to exist or it cuts off something from

our list of subjective possibilities. Hence, it must be that a graph scribed on the verso is

thereby denied. (para. 574)

Peirce’s epiphany that the verso of the sheet representing actuality “represents a kind of possibility” led to a new, stratified vision of graphic space (para. 577). The cut then becomes a puncture through various depths and strata of the sheet “so that the overturning of the piece cut out may expose one stratum or another, these being distinguished by their tints; the different tints representing different kinds of possibility” (para. 578).

At the most complex level of Peirce’s logic, the tinctures indicate “provinces” that are representative of exposed parts of other sheets not belonging to the phemic sheet. This use of tincture allows Peirce’s system to encompass various “Modes of Being,” universes of possibility and intentionality as well as actuality (para. 554). At the level of materiality, Peirce’s graphic operations can be accomplished with colored paper, drawn lines, and shaded areas to represent the sheets, cuts, and tinctures. At the level of graphic space, one has to imagine a whole multiverse of flat worlds or brains, continuously sliding over one another to represent increasingly complex logical content; the more complex the modality of the expressed content, the more chaotic the overlay of sheet-universes becomes. The Gamma system of EG retains the syllogism between sheet and mind, insofar as “the sheet of the graphs in all its states collectively, together with the laws of its transformations, corresponds to and represents the Mind in its relation to its thoughts” (para. 582). This is true based upon Peirce’s conception of the mind as

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“a comprehensive thought” and of the sheet as an all-encompassing graph. “Thus,” he writes,

“the system of existential graphs is a rough and generalized diagram of the Mind, and it gives a better idea of what the mind is, from the point of view of logic, than could be conveyed by any abstract account of it” (para. 582).

With the graphic system, Peirce occasionally overcomes the “logician’s bêtise.” At one stage in its development, he acknowledges that his description of the EG system’s graphical rules was afflicted by an overly narrow interpretation of what the two-sided sheet can represent; however, he only became fully cognizant of the problem after his “operose method like that of a hydrographic surveyor sounding out a harbor” delivered him to the realization that the verso sheet could stand for a universe of possibilities. As a result of this “striking proof of the superiority of the System of Existential Graphs to either of my algebras of logic,” Peirce becomes convinced of the reality of possibilities. The algebras are inferior “reasoning machines”; truths that only became apparent to him through working with existential graphs would have remained “hidden” by the “superfluous machinery” his non-graphical systems have to mobilize in order to represent logical laws (para. 581). For these reasons, he considered

“diagrammatic reasoning” to be “the only really fertile reasoning” (para. 571). Thus the quasi- mind of the graph not only represents the mind better than other accounts in Peirce’s view, it allows the mind to think more clearly as well.

III. Infographic Semiology

As Peirce’s exploration of graphic space demonstrates, graphs are effectively machines that process and think. They are an instrument of computation functioning in the absence of electronics: a reminder that computers are first and foremost logical operators whose parts can

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be real or imaginary, silicon or ink. The eighteenth century innovation that grounded Peirce’s thinking and guided his sense of how graphic thought-machines should operate and interact was graphic space on paper. Graphic spaces had heretofore been accessible through inscription surfaces: still media that could be marked on or traced into. When Bertin’s

Sémiologie Graphique first appeared in 1967, graphic space had reached a turning point that necessitated theorization. From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, the abstract space of graphic information existed solely on the page, but hereafter it would belong to the domain of the screen. The extent of graphic space became radically expanded and fundamentally altered with the arrival of the electronic screen. Bertin contended that “the great difference between the graphic representation of yesterday, which was poorly dissociated from the figurative image” and graphics in the age of electronic displays is that these images can now shed their “congenital fixity” (4). He goes on to suggest that the unfixed graphic belongs to an entirely different category than its congenitally fixed predecessor: “When one can superimpose, juxtapose, transpose, and permute graphic images in ways that lead to groupings and classings, the graphic image passes from the dead image, the ‘illustration,’ to the living image” (4). Still, despite his optimistic view of the transformational properties of the new graphic image, we’ve already seen that Bertin draws the line at analyzing graphics in motion.

As he conceives it, the “living” aspect of the screen consists solely of the capacity to vary between, internally alter, and generate new static images. The graphic is no longer spatially and materially bound by the page; it is now subject to the more fluid temporalities that the screen has on offer. Thus, the appearance of the screen in Sémiologie Graphique introduces both the exigency of Bertin’s theoretical project and its limit.

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Though written in a different language, discipline, and historical context, Bertin’s work

on the graphic nevertheless ventures into the same territory as Peirce’s project on graphic logic

and, especially, graphic space. To begin with, Bertin’s calls the sheet of assertion a plane

(“plan”) of information. There are three signifying “implantations” of the graphic which

correspond to “the three moments of the sensory continuum applied to the plane” (8). These

implantations are the dot, the line, and the area—the basic building-blocks of graphic images.

In screen space, they carry out the signifying functions within a larger graphic ensemble. The

type to which a graphic belongs is determined by the way it makes use of the three

implantations. A correspondence between elements of differing components constitutes a

diagram; a correspondence among elements of the same component constitutes a network; and

a correspondence among elements of a geographic component that is inscribed onto the

surface of the plane is called a map. A fourth type is the single element graphic: the symbol. It

standing apart from the other three in that it does not involve comparison between elements.

The graphic symbol is a form composed of graphic lines whose meaning depends on

correspondences exterior to it. Whereas the other graph-forms convey information through the

spatial configuration of their implantations, the symbol participates in “figurative analogies”

that require more than a spatial mechanic to be understood. In addition to the three

implantations, which constitute the native variables of the plane and make up the substance of

all maps, networks, and diagrams, Bertin enumerates six “retinal variables”: size, value,

texture, color, orientation, and shape. The retinal variables give the graphic “elevation” by allowing it to distinguish between more than two components (8-9). Retinal variables differ from Peirce’s tinctures in that they do not result in a modal graphic or interrupt the plane of information in any way. The function of the retinal variables is to distinguish components in

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their specificity (hardly a concern for Peirce’s relational system, in which the content of

expressions is entirely secondary to the logical relations between them).

The space of the plane of information is the sheet of assertion relocated to the imaginary

of the screen. The defining feature of the sheet of assertion is that meaning is immanent

everywhere in it: to be a mark on the sheet of assertion is to be part of a logical expression and a

mind, and even the empty sheet constitutes such an expression and mind. In Bertin’s plane of

information, every implantation means something or fulfills a function in relation to the whole,

and there are no areas within the graphic where meaning is absent. Because space itself carries

out the signifying function in graphics, even the absence of any implantations is a graphic and

a piece of information. Bertin gives this description of the limitless and seamless nature of

graphic space:

The plane is capable of infinite subdivision. It is continuous. Its divisibility is

limited only by the thresholds of perception and the limits of graphic

differentiation… Since it has no breaks in continuity, no ‘gaps,’ the plane will not

admit informational lacunae… Consequently, in a signifying space absence of signs

signifies absence of phenomena... In a signifying space, any visual variable appears

as meaningful… (46)20

The graphic plane is the visible superstratum of an infinite, imaginary information space. At

the moment it departs from the territory of pictorial representation, the graphic provides a

world of pure information beyond the physical domain, just as the geometric plane necessarily imagines a world of pure form. Beyond the frame of representational images, the mind automatically “fills-in” a phenomenological world such that landscapes, portraits, and certain

kinds of maps belong to an imaginary physical space that continues beyond their dimensions

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and includes all objects in extension. Likewise, the infinite plane onto which graphic space

opens does not stop at the edge of the page or screen, nor does it suddenly transform back into

physical space. “The frame of the image,” writes Bertin, “does not necessarily delimit the

phenomenon… a naturally circumscribed phenomenon…only appears spatially concentrated

when it is circumscribed by a margin where the ‘absence’ of the phenomenon is visible” (47).

What the mind “fills-in” at the horizon of the graphic is the continuation to infinity of

information space.

For Bertin, graphic space is demarcated by a zone of predetermined legibility; every variation within it can mean something, and every meaningful variation has a monosemic (or ideally monosemic) denotation.21 In giving each visible mark within the delineated space of a graphic a singular meaning, graphic space constructs an idealized “moment rationnel.” This idealization is compared in the text to the idealized conditions under which mathematical propositions operate and have their meanings.22 Looser comparisons could also be drawn to other discourses, such as the law, whose function is to establish a point of fixity against the chaos of shifting signifiers, fleeting contexts, and passional intensities. The only difference is that the graphic does so in relation to “spatial perception” (1983, 3). The graphic distinguishes itself from “other forms of visualization” insofar as its “reading operation takes place among given meanings” (2). Ideally, every instance of this “reading” should produce the same result, since the interpretive act has been crystalized, choreographed and fixed in time. In this sense,

Bertin’s concept of the rational moment corresponds to Peirce’s quasi-mind. Only here, the mind is figured temporally, in terms of a pause. Time, history, and the vicissitudes of interpretation are divested from the rational moment by an implicit agreement which is the necessary precondition of every infographic image. For the graphic to function, it must exist

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outside of time. The “moment rationnel” is therefore a quasi-mind that performs the coordinated thinking of the graphist and viewer by taking the act of thinking outside of time, into a graphic plane or sheet where time does not exist.

IV. Cinematographic Time and Cinematic Logic

We can now begin to understand Bertin’s apprehensions concerning the overwhelming

variables of movement and time. Infographic space yields an image that profoundly differs

from the cinematic image, which is to say, the moving image. All the powers of the cinema are

derived from movement, even after cinema advances to the point of constructing pure images

of time realized by aberrant movements; as Deleuze writes in the preface to The Movement-

Image, classical cinema consists of “an indirect representation of time which derives from

movement,” while cinematic modernism was characterized by “the direct time-image which

derives from movement” [italics mine] (ix). Deleuze goes on to say that the “capacities” of the

electronic image are “inseparable” from the cinema (x). In other words, for Deleuze, electronic

screens belong to the lineage of cinema, and they share the same fundamental connection with

movement. The infographic as anti-movement image belongs to an imaginary that

constitutively rejects the moving image. Nevertheless, the infographic image is precisely what

dominates the electronic screen in the digital age: a phenomenon that I traced in my second

chapter. In this sense, the infographic or digital screen (the two are one in the same, as my first

chapter theorized) is a paradox. The digital screen contains the self-contradictory space of the

anti-movement, movement image. This in itself constitutes the paradox that individuates

digital moving images as distinct from cinematic moving images.

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This becomes clearer when we consider the infographic quasi-mind in comparison to the cinematic brain. The cinema of mental relation begins with the oeuvre of Alfred Hitchcock, whom Deleuze credits with inventing “the image of mental relations” (x). The relation image that emerges in Hitchcock’s work places him “at the juncture of the two cinemas, the classical that he perfects and the modern that he prepares” (x). Hitchcock takes up the role of the spatial logician when he specularizes the mental image in terms of relationality. One can think of

Peirce’s idea of the mind represented through graphical relations transposed into a cinematic art. In fact, Deleuze defines this cinematic mental image in terms of Peirce’s concept of thirdness, or relational signs. In Peirce’s semiotics, firstness describes immediate qualities, secondness direct relations, and thirdness indirect or mediated relations. The organic cinema of action from which Hitchcock developed some aspects of his style constituted the image- sequence in terms of secondness: on causes and effects, crimes and retributions, etc. By contrast, Hitchcock’s separates perception from action, coordinating it instead with the intentionality of a looking and thinking participant-spectatorial camera. Hitchcock’s films no longer depend on who did what, but on who knows, suspects, doubts, or finds out. These are all intentional or relational operations, performed at the level of cinematography rather than acting. Thus the mental process does not exist at the level of action, but above it, conditioning and superseding it; in thirdness, the relational quality of the image “does not simply surround action, it penetrates it in advance and in all its parts, and transforms it into a necessarily symbolic act” (201). Though they serve the purposes of an art form, Hitchcock’s films raise the mental process to the level of the image. In a different discipline, he confronts the same problem as Peirce: the problem of synchronizing a process of formalized thought to a visual impression. Their solutions are different, but both result in a trinary relation; Peirce’s graph

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constitutes an act of choreographed thinking taking place between yet in the absence of the

graphist and interpreter, and Hitchcock’s film performs a cognitive function that unfolds

between the director and audience. This is why “in the history of the cinema Hitchcock

appears as one who no longer conceives of the constitution of a film as a function of two terms

- the director and the film to be made - but as a function of three: the director, the film and the public” (202).

The mental image in Hitchcock is the cinema’s visual system of logic, such as Peirce envisioned. On Deleuze’s reading, Hitchcock’s films begin with a “postulate” and proceed

“with a mathematical or absolute necessity.” Further, the film narratives unfold on the basis of what Deleuze calls “experienced conjunctions,” which are also expressions of logical relation:

“since . . . if . . . even if . . .” (202). These logical relations refer back to a spectatorial camera that is fixed outside of the action in order to separate the action from the logical process. This is how Deleuze explains the importance of stillness and immobilization in some of

Hitchcock’s most mature films. In Rear Window, for instance, Jeffries “has access to the mental image, not simply because he is a photographer, but because he is in a state of immobility: he is reduced as it were to a pure optical situation.” By thus reinventing the classical cinematic image as a result of “the rupture of the sensory-motor links in a particular character,” Hitchcock’s films already symptomatize the crisis of the movement image (205).

Hitchcock’s cinema occupies a transitional place in the history of the moving image precisely because it substitutes the mental image in place of the action image, disrupting the temporal configurations of action-oriented cinema in favor of an immobilization that paved the way for the emergence of the time-image. Hitchcockian image had to suspend action in order to allow for the kind of orchestrated cognitive relations that would constitute a cinema of the mind.

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The principal difference between Hitchcockian immobility and infographic anti-

movement is that the cinematic mental image still derives from movement, even as it works

against it. In classical cinema, actions, both discursive and physical, motivate the movement of

the camera and the editing of the film into meaningful sequences. In Hitchcock, action has to

be neutralized or devalued in order for another level of the movement-image to show itself

through the cognitively signifying movements of the camera-as-spectator. It is the movement

of the camera, then, which embodies and temporalizes the mental processes of Hitchcock’s

films:

The characters can act, perceive, experience, but they cannot testify to the relations

which determine them. These are merely the movements of the camera, and their

movements towards the camera. Hence, the opposition between Hitchcock and the

Actors Studio, his requirement that the actor acts in the most simple, even neutral, way,

the camera attending to what remains. This remainder is the essential or the mental

relation. It is the camera, and not a dialogue, which explains why the hero of Rear

Window has a broken leg (photos of the racing car, in his room, broken camera). (201)

It is this alignment between the moving image and mental processes that makes the cinematic mental image possible. The cognitive function of the infographic substitutes a whole set of spatial relations for this singular, temporal one. The time of Hitchcock’s film belongs to a very disciplined temporality, in which the duration and order of the shots is meticulously orchestrated. But this is still different from the exclusion of time, and still allows for polysemic effects, ambiguities, and other eventualities that rely on the temporal function of deferred and multiplied interpretive possibility. The logic of the cinema of mental images inheres in the process of undergoing a mental process and following a temporal path, whereas the cognitive

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function of graphic space depends on a thought-process that has already been carried out and preserved for repetition. In Hitchcock, we see that the moving image can carry out logical functions, but these belong to the domain of temporalized logical functions. The logic of the moving image can never be commensurate with the logic of the graph and vice versa. The infographic system constitutes a cognitive machinery that is utterly alien to the cinematic brain.

Hitchcock’s work raises the possibility of a cinema that thinks within us. Without duplicating the image of mental relations, the digital screen now presents its own strange possibility (or impossibility) of an infographic brain that thinks atemporally within the moving image.

Conclusion: From One Screen to Another

Between the infographic and the moving image, we encounter two logics: a logic of the page and a logic of the screen. In another sense, what we encounter here are two ways of defining a screen. One is ancient and belongs to computing; the other is modern and belongs to the cinema. In chapter one, we saw the modern definition of the screen in The Movement-

Image. There, a screen is defined as a brain or center of indetermination (62). This belongs to the modern age because the screen is not understood in this way until the arrival of the cinema.

The ancient screen corresponds to the graphic page and to the digital. Deleuze evokes this screen in A Thousand Plateaus when he describes the “point of departure” of modern information theory as a ready-made set of possible messages organized into binary or

“biunivocal” relationships. According to Deleuze, this “binarization” depends upon the presence of a “screen.” This screen functions as a “computing hole”: a negative void that facilitates binary computation by providing it with a space that is neutral and totalizing. “The black hole/white wall system” writes Deleuze, “must already have gridded all of space and

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outlined its arborescences or dichotomies for those of signifier and subjectification even to be conceivable.” The screen protects the “mixed semiotic of signifiance and subjectification” from the “primitive polyvocality” that lurks outside of its binary logic (198). Signification using

“digitalized, discrete elements” is possible “only if there is a semiological screen available”

(199). I call this screen ancient because it already characterizes the graphic line and the surface of inscription. At the same time, it is the basis of the computational, and of the digital understood as infographic. Both are screens because both perform the function of the screen, which is to separate, frame, contain, or alter the flux of the world that surrounds the screen. The cinema screen acts as a center of indetermination in relation to the flows of time. The graphic screen acts as center of signification or determination against the polyvocality of the primitive world. The page was already a screen, then, but in a very different sense than the sense in which the cinema screen frames sections of time.

There is a sense in which the infographic screen was in tension with the moving image screen at its very origins. Indeed, forbearers of the cinema such as Étienne-Jules Marey and

Eadweard Muybridge were engaged in the construction not of moving-images but of infographics. Their earliest experiments devised means of taking multiple photographs in rapid succession at regular intervals. This made it possible to analyze the gait of a galloping horse

(Muybridge) or the movement of a jumping man in midair (Marey). For Marey, bright, graphic lines drawn along the limbs and trunks of the bodies in motion made their movements easier to dissect. For Muybridge, silhouetting the horse against regular vertical lines translated the fluid movement into a series of measurable distances and positions. These experiments resulted in photographic versions of the time-series. Edward Tufte cites the time-series as one of the first and the most commonly implemented forms of infographic design in history (28). Time-series

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transform time-based variation into discrete, spatialized instances, arranged for side-by-side comparison. In the sense that they function by transforming motion into a static logic of succession, time-series are the quintessential atemporalizing infographic. The early chronophotographic work that preceded cinema utilized graphic elements to divide, measure, chart and dissect moving forms. The initial goal of these experiments was to produce visual forms that worked against the flux of time, in the direction of the clarity and stability of stasis.

From this initial anti-motion work came the possibility of animating photographic sequences to produce cinematographic ones. The infographic page as another kind of screen gave way to the cinematic screen when the work of wresting the image away from motion shifted into the work of producing a moving image. From here, the moving image and infographic move along their own paths until they converge again in the age of the electronic screen.

The atemporality of the infographic points us back to the screen as the place of confrontation between two logical systems, two spatial systems, and two artificial minds. It points us to two screens within the digital screen, in virtue of which the moving image and the infographic image coexist uneasily. In chapter two, I attempted to show how the moving image and the infographic became intertwined in the digital screen. Here, my objective has been to demonstrate how this intertwining is not harmonious, not seamless and not readily assimilable to either of the separate logics of graphic space and image time. This argument is meant to direct attention back to the screen as an important site for theorization. As digital screens become more ubiquitous and computers become increasingly complex, it is tempting to think of the screen as the window-dressing of a hidden, digital world. In the context of digital theory, focusing on the screen is now regarded by some as the essentialism of a bygone era of thought.

“Screen essentialism” is Nick Montfort’s term for the undue emphasis on the screen to the

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exclusion of other forms of “output” (“Continuous Paper”). I argue that the screen is not the

mundane outward manifestation of a digital process that happens elsewhere. It is a uniquely

fraught space where the infographic logic of the digital and the temporal logic of the moving

image collide: a contradiction at the heart of our everyday media. In this sense, the screen gives

us an opportunity for rethinking the digital. Even as the screen is beginning to seem an old,

well-worn place for theory, the digital screen as I have theorized it calls for a renewed critical attention.

This project began with the problem of digital aesthetics. What I have attempted to do is to provide groundwork for approaching this problem in relation to the digital image and the digital screen within the broader history of twentieth century moving images. The problem of digital aesthetics is an immanently theoretical problem; it doesn’t concern particular artworks that might be deemed “digital.” Rather, it concerns the apparent incompatibility of two concepts: the concept of aesthesis and the concept of the digital. As Beatrice Fazi points out in

“Digital Aesthetics: The Discrete and the Continuous,” the majority of aesthetic approaches to the digital function by addressing themselves to aspects of the digital that are already analog, in the sense of continuous. This poses a theoretical problem, because such an approach doesn’t address what is uniquely alien or resistant to our understanding within the digital. Rather, it conforms the digital to a familiar aesthetic register such that it can be talked about in terms of older, established ways of thinking. Of aesthetic theories of the digital that foreground the human or embodiment, among other concepts classically associated with aesthetics, Fazi writes:

Their implied conclusion is that the quantitative character of digital technology has to be

‘corrected’ in order to be more aesthetic… The struggle of thinking discreteness and

aesthetics together thus remains. Moreover, one can see here the fundamental difficulty

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faced by an aisthesis (i.e. a sensory knowledge) of the digital. This difficulty concerns

the possibility (or impossibility) of assigning a productive capacity to the informational,

calculatory, codified structures of digital computing. The dynamic and generative power

of sensation contrasts with the static nature of the formal, finite and binary means

through which the digital computing machine harnesses the lived. (9)

The root of the problem, as Fazi presents it, is that the digital seems impoverished in relation to other domains of experience. There is an undeniable conceptual poverty associated with the image of a world composed of codes and computational processes. To aestheticize the digital is taken to mean enriching it with what it lacks, and this inevitably leads to the theorization of the digital in ways that end up eliding its particularity. Fazi proposes a solution to the problem of digital aesthetics that attends to the discrete and computational without transposing it back into a more familiar aesthetic register. Her solution is the concept of the incomputable, which she describes as:

a formal, logical and quantitative indeterminacy that is central to computational systems,

and which does not contradict their functionality. On the contrary, it grounds it. This is

key: the incomputable is not an accident, not an error, not a glitch and not even a chance

event. The incomputable is not a mistake for the computational system, but the founding

condition thereof. Because the incomputable is this element of ‘undecidability’ that is

logically inscribed into every computation, something in computation remains unknown

and, ultimately, beyond representation. (21).

In the concept of the incomputable, Fazi discovers something uncertain which is nevertheless germane to the logic that makes the digital world function. For Fazi, this uncertainty or undecidability is the site where a digital aesthetics becomes thinkable precisely because it

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disrupts the orderliness and predictability that hitherto made digital aesthetics impossible to imagine. The incomputable thus constitutes an aesthetic potentiality proper to the digital rather than derived from it (23).

Yet how we think about the incomputable will depend in large part upon how we define the digital. At the outset, Fazi defines the digital in terms of the “operational mechanisms of the computer or the digital device” (4). This is a major point of commonality between Fazi and the approaches she critiques; they all engage with the digital through the technological lens of the computational, equating the digital with computing machines and computing processes, in contrast to the image-oriented theory of the digital I develop here. In my view, theoretically limiting the digital to the computer is untenable, for reasons I have explored in earlier chapters.

However, there is a way in which the incomputable still pertains to the broader, non-computer- specific sense of the digital. Part of Fazi’s argument depends upon the premise that computers are “engines of logic,” which she defines as “realizations of those strategies of formal abstraction that deductive thought has developed over many centuries in order to organize and make sense of reality” (15). These strategies culminate in disciplines such as information theory and machines such as the difference engine. With the arrival of electronics, they proliferate in the form of the digital device (15). But proliferation in itself does not constitute a difference in kind; there may be more engines of logic operating in the networks of the digital age, but they still operate in accordance with a logic that by Fazi’s own admission precedes them. The incomputable as Fazi defines it is the result of the finitude of logic’s resolving power:

According to Turing’s algorithmic model of computation, to compute is to follow an

effective, determinate and deterministic procedure (i.e. an algorithm) in order to solve a

problem in a finite number of subsequent steps. In his 1936 foundational paper ‘On

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Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem’, however,

Turing demonstrated that some problems cannot be solved via algorithmic means,

because the steps involved in their processing are not finite, but rather infinite: these

problems are therefore incomputable. (21)

What underlies the complex problem of the incomputable, then, is the rather straightforward problem of the finitude of logical processing. The paradigmatic case of the

“Entscheidungsproblem” or halting problem shows the constitutive relationship between the incomputable and temporality. In this problem, an algorithm is to be designed which will determine whether a computer program will stop or run infinitely. Complex programs may continue indefinitely, in the sense that no algorithmic procedure could reliably and in every case determine if the program will stop. If a predetermined logic cannot sort the program into the categories of either finite or infinite, the only possible algorithm is one that goes through the steps of the program itself to determine if it will stop. In this case, there is no way to determine if the program will stop or continue without waiting for the moment in time when it does stop, which could take any finite amount of time. The algorithm thus fails by matching itself to the time of the program. Its failure is signified by the instance in which it has to animate itself into a non-predetermined temporality. The limit of the halting problem is complexity in the form of indefinite time.

Although the incomputable plays a role in the functioning of computing machines, it belongs originally to the logic of the discrete withdrawing from the indefinite. Graphic space as a center of determination and a machine for computation has the same incomputable limit. Its artificial atemporality is an expression of the machinic brain withdrawing from indefinite time.

By situating the computer within the larger history of logic and information, we can understand

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how the incomputable of the digital screen is enacted as the unthinkable through the confrontation between infographics and the moving image. This is the incomputable in the sense of the unthinkable, paradoxical site of the digital screen. If the infographic image embodies the total breakdown of temporality, in which thought withdraws from the world into itself and the image loses its reference to any image aside from itself, then the digital screen as the living-dead image, the frozen-in-thought or atemporal-motion image constitutes an entirely new problem for theory and for aesthetic practice; it calls for an entirely new will-to-art.

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CODA:

THE ABSTRACT LINE AND THE DIAGRAM

An examination of particular works of digital art in relation to the aesthetically motivating paradox of the infographic/digital screen is beyond the scope of this dissertation.

Instead, I will conclude with some speculation into the tools and techniques that might prove effective in opening up the paradox of the digital screen as a space for aesthetic interventions.

The infographic/digital functions on the basis of the graphic line. What form the aesthetic response to the digital screen will take must be determined in some measure by the aesthetic response to the graphic line. The graphic line as I have theorized it is absolute, cutting, and steeped in the semiology of signification. It is in every way inimical to what Deleuze calls the abstract line. The abstract line is first mentioned by Deleuze in Difference and Repetition as a painterly line that seems to lift the ground of the painting rather than tracing a form over it (37).

Later, it reappears in A Thousand Plateaus as the line of flight or deterritorialization. The abstract line is described as being “converted” by imperialistic cultures into what I term the graphic line (497). The conversion of the abstract line commences the prominent traditions of representational art, including Greek and Egyptian, as it replaces a nomadic aesthesis with a sedentary and consolidating one. However, it is not representation or figuration itself which determines the change, but the function of the line as it shifts from being part of the page

(ground, sheet, plane, canvas, etc.) to standing out from it. What began as one and multiple—the ground rising up to meet the eye—ends up as one becoming two: figure and ground, digitization.

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The change from abstract to graphic or “imperial” is not a question of progression but of shifting polarities; the abstract is always contemporaneous with the graphic, and the possibility of reversing polarities from one to the other is never a great leap or a movement backwards (497).

Abstract art, which potentially allows the abstract line to consume the entire optical field, is always in danger of becoming a “symbolic coding of the figurative” (Bacon 109).

For the painter Francis Bacon, the way to mitigate against this danger is expressed in terms of the

“graph” or diagram. In Deleuze’s Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, the concept of the diagram is deployed in connection with an element Bacon himself termed the graph. Bacon’s use of the word graph in an interview was opportunely translated from English to French as

“diagramme” (Zdebik). For Bacon, the diagram exists in collaboration with the abstract line, but not necessarily in the form of total abstraction. In Bacon’s paintings, the diagram appears as a zone of distortion or chaos that the organized forms of the painting attempt to contain. Through the form of the diagram, an unstable process involving abstraction and figuration is achieved.

Recognizable forms interrupt the pandemonium of the diagrammatic blot, while the diagram explodes the orderliness and closure of the forms. The diagram distributes signifying traits that belong to one form into the space of another form, alters the scale of the painting, whirls together sequential or differential forms into areas of indetermination, and otherwise acts as a vortex of energy tearing away at the organizational elements of the pictorial space. At the same time, it makes the creation and deformation of the pictorial space into a visible process, blowing a hole in the space to make the viewer aware of a non-space that the pictorial space flows out from and leaks back into. As an aesthetic operator, the diagram is where the actuality of the painting interacts with virtuality (157).

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In Bacon’s painting, the line of the diagram does not trace or divide as the graphic line

does; its function is original and destabilizing. The diagram is associated with asignifying ruptures and with transformations that “blow apart semiotic systems” (151, 153). Bacon’s

preparatory, diagrammatic work in his paintings serves as a way of revealing and foregrounding

the diagrammatic mechanisms underlying the representational schemes of figurative painting,

clearing away layers of signification to show the abstract implantations of the diagram on the

aesthetic space of the canvas. In Deleuze’s own writings, one finds numerous, sparsely notated

sketches of planes, folds, and spiraling lines of flight. Whether or not these tracings evoke the

diagrammatic function about which Deleuze writes, they certainly challenge the orderliness and

legibility of infographic space with their curving, involuted forms and anti-signifying semiotic content. Rather than subordinate the space of the page to a preconceived plane of coherent meaning, they make use of space to modify and distort linguistic meaning, spatializing the concepts they gesture towards in creative ways. In one of his diagrammatic sketches for

Foucault, philosophical signifiers like God and the self become folds in a warping and tensing abstract line. Visualizing diagrammatic functions in this way produces something like an anti- graphic: a destabilizing anomaly in graphic space akin to Bacon’s diagrammatic zones of indetermination. In this way, the diagram that emerges out of Deleuze’s work may already have given us a starting point for thinking against the totalizing effects of infographic space on the page—a model based on Bacon’s graph as an explosive and generative intermediary between optical abstraction and graphical figuration. The question remains as to where (and how) the diagrammatic function comes into contact with the moving image, as well as what diagrammatic aesthetic practices can be deployed in conjunction with the constitutive paradox of the digital/infographic screen.

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END NOTES

1The Time-Image (1985), 265.

2Semiology of Graphics (1967), 4.

3 Peirce called the project his “Chef D’Oeuvre.”

4The Time-Image, 366.

5In “Computers and the Superfold,” for example, Alexander Galloway considers the lasting relevance of “Postscript” to our understanding of digital media and the control society, citing it as one of the few instances in which Deleuze directly addresses computer technology and the analog vs. digital distinction. See: Alexander Galloway. “Computers and the Superfold” Deleuze Studies 6.4(2012): 513–528.

6The OED entry on “communication, n.” cites instances of the use of communication to describe a shared feeling or affinity dating back to the Wycliffite Bible c1384. Communication as a term for sexual intercourse dates at least to 15th century; its common usage of a transmission of ideas via a medium stems from the 16th century, and its usage to describe a connection between routes or passages in transportation stems from the 18th century. See: "communication, n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2019, www.oed.com/view/Entry/37309.

7Referring to the CNT/FAI-led Revolución Social Española of 1936.

8Vertov’s “kinok-network” serves as an alternate but equally utopian dream of the future of documentary news production and broadcasting to that of his Western contemporaries. See: Elizabeth Papazian. Manufacturing Truth: The Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009; See also: Kino-Eye:The Writings of Dziga Vertov. ed. Annette Michelson. trans. Kevin O'Brien. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; and: Yuri Tsivian, ed. Lines of Resistance: Dziga Vertov and the Twenties. Trans. Julian Gaffy. Sacile: Le Giornate Del Cinema Muto, 2004.

9Affectively, the catastrophic happens to be television’s primary mode. See Mary Anne Doane’s “Information, Crisis, Catastrophe,” cited in Chapter 2: Genealogies of the Digital Screen, as well as: Stanley Cavell. “The Fact of Television.” Daedalus. 111.4(1982): 75-96.

10Find more information on this in Chapter 3: Semiotics of Graphic Space.

11As Gregory Flaxman points out, Deleuze is guilty of a distortion here in claiming that Bergson sees cinema as an imitation of natural perception. It would be more accurate to paraphrase Bergson’s point by saying that cinema shows us the mechanism of normal perception. See: Gregory Flaxman. “Cinema Year Zero.” The Brain is the Screen. ed. Flaxman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000.

12Quoted in: Conway, The Origins of Television News, 150.

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13At the same time, this is not to suggest that the subject of graphics in computing has already been satisfactorily explored in the scholarly literature. In “Hidden Surface Problems: On the Digital Image as Material Object” (2015), Jacob Gaboury writes that “there have been few serious treatments of computer graphics beyond their most visible manifestations in popular film and videogames. Perhaps most glaring of all, the history of computer graphics remains largely unwritten” (45).

14Wojcieszak directs the reader to a litany of sources for analyses of the conveyance of visual information in the context of printed news material including: Karin Becker. “Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press.” The Photography Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003; Robert Craig. “Fact, Public Opinion and Persuasion: The Rise of the Visual in Journalism and Advertising.” Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Julianne Newton. The Burden of Visual Truth: The Role of Photojournalism in Mediating Reality. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001; Dona Schwartz. “Objective Representation: Photographs as Facts.” Picturing the Past: Media, History, and Photography. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999; Barbie Zelizer. “Journalism through the Camera’s Eye.” Journalism: Critical issues. Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2005. Additional works that are relevant to this topic include: Elsayed Bekhit. "Infographics in the United Arab Emirates Newspapers." Journalism 10.4 (2009): 492-508; Murray Dick. "Just Fancy that: An Analysis of Infographic Propaganda in the Daily Express, 1956-1959." Journalism Studies (2014); William Kinnally et al. "Exemplars can Affect Readers' Judgment about News Story." Newspaper Research Journal 35.2 (2014): 134; Sandra H. Utt and Steve Pasternak. "Update on Infographics in American Newspapers." Newspaper Research Journal 21.2 (2000): 55.

15This was a common problem in early television news. Orrin Dunlap Jr., a mid-century supporter and chronicler of television broadcasting, cites an anonymized representative of a large newsreel corporation complaining that “we comb the earth for a weekly reel, and there are weeks when it’s a mighty difficult job to get a good one” (Future of Television 74).

16 Semiology of Graphics, 4.

17“We see in the crystal the perpetual foundation of time, nonchronological time, Cronos and not Chronos.” Deleuze, Cinema 2, 81.

18“Sur ce point, graphique et mathématique sont semblables et construisent le moment rationnel.” Bertin, Sémiologie graphique, 7.

19In the reception of Peirce’s work, attempts have been made to expand the graphic system even further. An indexical sheet for Peirce’s EG has recently been proposed in: Rocco Gangle and Caterina Gianluca. “The Sheet of Indication: a Diagrammatic Semantics for Peirce’s EG-Alpha.” Synthese 192.4(2015): 923–940.

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20Bertin’s language is reminiscent of Serge Daney’s critique of the television news visual. In a series of reflections on Gulf War coverage first published in the Revue d’etudes palestiniennes, Daney describes the impossibility of absence in the construction of the visual thus: It doesn’t bother me when they say on television that they could not send journalists to Iraq because Saddam Hussein was opposed to it. But it must be said in such a way that the television viewers say to themselves: ‘Ah, there’s an image missing’ and do not forget it… For an old issue of Cahiers du cinéma, ten years ago, [Godard] asked us to illustrate an interview with him using big empty spaces… In leaving the space empty, he showed the possibility of not filling in. Today, I have the feeling that we have lost, that Godard lost and that the media—headed by television—forbid us from thinking: ‘Ah, there’s an image missing, let’s leave the space empty, let’s wait for it to be filled.’ (188)

21From the introduction to Semiology of Graphics: “As a monosemic system, [graphics] forms the rational part of the world of images… Within the boundaries of graphics fall the fields of networks, diagrams, and maps…graphics is one of the major ‘languages’ applicable to information processing.” (2). 22Also from the introduction: “…to agree on certain meanings expressed by certain signs, and agree to discuss them no further… This convention allows us to discuss the collection of signs and to link propositions in a sequence which can become ‘undebatable,’ that is ‘logical...’ this is the object of mathematics, which deals with problems involving temporal sequence. It is the object of graphics, which operates in areas linked to the tridimensionality of spatial perception” (3).

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