IMMERSION AND CONTEMPLATION: MERGING MODELS OF KNOWLEDGE IN NEW MEDIA NARRATIVES By ELISABET TAKEHANA A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2010 1 © 2010 Elisabet Takehana 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank the Director of my dissertation committee, Gregory L. Ulmer, for his guidance and the committee members for their interest in my work. 3 TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.................................................................................................................... 3 ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... 6 CHAPTER 1 DETERMINING A NEW RHETORIC ....................................................................................... 8 Realism Meets Avant-Garde: A Popular Aesthetics ................................................................... 8 The Source: Instinct and Emotion .............................................................................................. 15 The Process: Sharing the Creative Production of a Work ........................................................ 21 The Product: Gathering Fragments and Cultivating Creative Sparks ...................................... 29 Finding Our Footing: Bringing the Music Video to School ..................................................... 35 2 THE PROTEAN PRODUCT ..................................................................................................... 40 Why The Cut-up Method? .......................................................................................................... 42 Nullifying Aristotle: Disengaging Control......................................................................... 45 Redefining Power: Non-Power and Forcework ................................................................. 49 How Does Cut-up Enact Non-Power? ....................................................................................... 52 Making Media Tangible ...................................................................................................... 57 Folding in Media and Your Immediate Environment ....................................................... 62 Who Is the New Media Subject? ................................................................................................ 67 3 THE COLLABORATIVE PROCESS ....................................................................................... 77 Alone: In the Beginning There Was Lack ................................................................................. 83 Someone Else: “I’s” Be Fruitful and Multiply .......................................................................... 89 Everyone Else: And the “I’s” Shall Become One ..................................................................... 94 Organizing Perspectives: Modulating the Trait....................................................................... 102 4 ITINERATE DESIRE AND DATA NARRATIVES............................................................. 112 Digital Subject: Spectactor in a Digital Network Community............................................... 117 Human / Computer Penetration ................................................................................................ 122 The Multimodal Computer: Experiments in Sensation .......................................................... 126 A Digital Literary Tradition .............................................................................................. 127 Are Digital Art and Literature Distinct?........................................................................... 130 Digital Narrative as Pattern Recognition ................................................................................. 136 Compiling : Compositing :: Writing : Reading ............................................................... 140 Affect, Risk, and Aesthetics .............................................................................................. 143 4 5 THE MERGER: AESTHETIC JUDGMENT ......................................................................... 149 The Source: Instinct, Desire, and the Seat of Taste ................................................................ 156 The Process: Collaboration and Sensus Communis through Imagination ............................. 163 The Product: Appropriation and the Specta(c)tor ................................................................... 168 Education and Aesthetic Judgment: Design Transformation and the Scrutiny of Analysis . 175 WORKS CITED ............................................................................................................................... 184 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ........................................................................................................... 197 5 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy IMMERSION AND CONTEMPLATION: MERGING MODELS OF KNOWLEDGE IN NEW MEDIA NARRATIVES By Elisabet Takehana May 2010 Chair: Gregory L. Ulmer Major: English With the growing influence of technology and popular culture on contemporary literary works, the prevalence of multi- and intermedia works, and the increased availability of technology in the classroom, deriving a rhetoric that cooperatively embraces intellectual rigor and popular sensationalism is crucial for traditional institutions if they are to maintain relevance with their changing audience. The now established debate between these seeming opposites is exemplified by Georg Lukács and Bertolt Brecht’s divergent opinions on the relevance and content of popular aesthetics. For Lukács, understanding how the revolutionary infiltrates popular culture is accomplished through scrutiny and analysis. However, Bertolt Brecht posits that the worker is in fact open to experimentation, welcoming innovative ways to represent their social situations. The divisions of this debate have been, I propose, resolved by new media practices that borrow conventions across various media and discourses. As a consequence of the mass media explosion of the late 20th century, the divide between these two fields of inquiry and production has decreased, bringing to the fore the need to address both models of immersion and contemplation. This study builds on Lev Manovich’s project of outlining a language of new media by examining a diverse set of collage and montage practices that already exist in popular culture and 6 literary works. The first chapter examines the music video work of Björk Guðmundsdóttir and Michel Gondry. Using Björk as a marker of potential, I parse three crucial characteristics of new media aesthetics: desire, collaboration, and appropriation. Chapter two discusses appropriation in conjunction with William Burroughs’ use of the cut-up and Robert Rauschenberg’s combines and silkscreens. Chapter three addresses collaboration in conjunction with Virginia Woolf’s novel, The Waves, as not only an early exploration of digital subjectivity as multiple and monadic but also as an intrinsically multimodal composition. Examining several digital literature and art pieces, the fourth chapter claims writing in the digital environment is a practice of collecting affective potential and reading becomes an act of browsing and remixing. The fifth chapter posits aesthetic judgment as the action par excellence of the new media subject who recognizes aesthetics and design as a crucial political and ethical foundation of the construction of public space and educational development. 7 CHAPTER 1 DETERMINING A NEW RHETORIC I truly and in my heart feel that I’m doing music for the everyday person. I could have so easily gone and become a composer and done some avant-garde music in some corner for the chosen eleven and a half person [sic]. But I never wanted to do that. I think my role is more to be some sort of a communicator between all sort of different worlds. --Björk Guðmundsdóttir Realism Meets Avant-Garde: A Popular Aesthetics As we cross into the twenty first century, hybrid media works that borrow conventions from various disciplines, such as literature’s appropriation of collage from the modern visual arts, and popular genres which actively incorporate avant-garde techniques, such as the music video, have brought us to the tail end of a long debate between Realism and the avant-garde. This debate has not continued to resurface because it is unresolved. The prolific use and experimentation of avant-garde techniques by professional artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and particularly, the layperson and his or her increasingly powerful and affordable computer, have shown the potential and acceptance of working with Realist and avant-garde methods and styles. We continue to return to this oppositional debate because we have yet to appropriate and determine a rhetoric that fully addresses working with elements of Realism and the avant-garde in popular culture; that is, to view each – and their collations – as more than a style but, in fact, as a method of thinking and working in the late age of print and the emergent age of digital media. Before I put my cart ahead of the horse, we will return to this original debate and its subsequent need for a new rhetoric of the twenty first century. This debate between the relevance of Realism and