High Framerate Cinema: continuity and change in discourses of immersiveness

The Digital in Depth:

An Interdisciplinary Symposium on Depth in Digital Media

Friday 30th May, 2014

Hosted by the Institute of Advanced Study and the Department of Film and Television Studies, Millburn House, University of Warwick.

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lisa Purse (University of Reading, Author of Digital Imaging in Popular Cinema and Contemporary Action Cinema)

This symposium explores the ways in which depth imagery is constructed and consumed in contemporary digital practices, and the ways in which we might interpret it. Most digital platforms’ content is consumed through flat screens and yet many of their aesthetics seem anxious to convey the illusion of depth. This curious and ubiquitous paradox is visible, for example, in digital cinema’s most recent spate of 3-D films and the institutional dimensionality of videogames’ fictional environments through which the player wanders. In computing, also, user interfaces and head-up displays demonstrate a renegotiated relationship to the image that is dependent on deep spaces made immediately accessible for spectators and users.

The symposium investigates the different media that characterise contemporary culture and the aesthetic, cultural and political implications of their digital depth. How is this illusion of depth constructed, and to what ends? The symposium will investigate avenues through which academia might read and interpret both these images and the changing mediascape of which they are a part. It will also ask what these digital constructions of depth demonstrate about the changing culture that they help to construct.

David Woods will be presenting a paper on HFR in this event. High Framerate Cinema (HFR) is promoted as a leap forward in the cinema experience. This paper will illustrate how some of the claims made by its creators echo very closely those surrounding the introduction of widescreen processes in the 1950s. Chief amongst these is the promise of increased immersiveness, an idea which is of course also associated with 3D. However, then as now immersiveness proves to be a complex and contradictory notion in promotional and popular discourse, and the outlines of its principal meanings will be charted. While some of the issues raised by the term have remained constant across the period, the paper argues that the psychovisual characteristics of HFR do point to new configurations between cinema and other media platforms, specifically television and videogames, and prompt further investigation of the potential for new forms of onscreen presence. Moreover, these characteristics can operate in combination with other technologies such as 3D or IMAX but are autonomous from them, suggesting the possibility of an increasingly intricate and diverse media landscape.

For the event details: http://thedigitalindepth.wordpress.com/

Value, Measurement and the Power to Act

Andrea Wittel recently gave a paper which reconsiders Marx's notions of 'value' in relation to digital capitalism.

While his paper is grounded in Marxian theory, he argues against Marx's attempts to measure or even explain the value of commodities.The paper consists of three parts. In the first part Andreas briefly reviews and contrasts Marx' s approach to value in Capital vol 1 with his approach to value in the Grundrisse. While the labour theory of value (as developed in Capital vol 1) is by and large unable to explain value in cognitive capitalism (replace cognitive capitalism as you like with post-fordism, immaterial production, the information age, or digital capitalism), his concept in Grundrisse is much more promising: In Grundrisse, Marx argues that 'the creation of wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed […] but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology […] Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself' (p704) What comes to replace labour is the 'general intellect'.

While such an approach seems to be better suitable for an explication of value, it also remains rather vague. In the second part of this paper Andreas argues that this vagueness is at the same time its real strength. In digital capitalism value is beyond measure. 'What has irreversibly changed however, from the times of the predominance of the classical theory of value, involves the possibility of developing the theory of value in terms of economic order, or rather, the possibility of considering value as a measure of concrete labor.' (Negri 1999: 77-8). The measurement of value, understood as an economic term and as a category of exchange is the problem of capital only. Marx's (labour) theory of value is not a trans-historical theory, but a theory of value in capitalist societies only. The task of today is a more generic understanding of value. Rather than focusing on free labour (Terranova) or audiences (Smythe) to understand the production of value in media environments, we are better off to give up on this project and develop alternative models of value that include processes of counter-commodification such as the digital commons.

Negri suggests to transform the theory of value from above to a theory of value 'from below, from the basis of life' (1999: 78). Drawing on the work of Spinoza, Negri sees value as the power to act. What does it mean to understand value as something that empowers people to act? 

The third part of this paper attempts to respond to this challenge. This is an attempt to rethink value not just as a theory but as a theory of practice. In the current crisis we need to strengthen an understanding of value that links it tightly to political engagement.

Andreas Wittel, 'Value, Measurement and the Power to Act', VII International Conference on Communication and Reality: Breaking the Media Chain, Universitat Ramon Lull, Barcelona, 13-14 June 2013.

Digital Marx

In a recent article, Andreas Wittel offers ways of theorizing the political economy of distributed media. 

In 'Digital Marx', he starts from the claim that in the age of mass media the political economy of media has engaged with Marxist concepts in a rather limited way. In the age of digital media Marxist theory could and should be applied in a much broader sense to this field of research. The article provides a rationale for this claim with a two step approach. The first step is to produce evidence for the claim that political economy of mass media engaged with Marxist theory in a rather limited way. It is also to explain the logic behind this limited engagement. The second step – which really is the core objective of the article – is an exploration of key concepts of Marx’s political economy - such as labour, value, property and struggle - and a brief outline of their relevance for a critical analysis of digital media. These concepts are particularly relevant for a deeper understanding of phenomena such as non-market production, peer production, and the digital commons, and for interventions in debates on free culture, intellectual property, and free labour.

Andreas Wittel (2012), Digital Marx: Toward a Political Economy of Distributed Media, Triple C, 10(2)