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 © 2019 Jacob T. Watson ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii 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 re- imagining 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. iii To Larry and Pat Watson and Nadine Gravitt iv 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. v 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 vi 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 vii 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. 1 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,