William Kentridge by Kate McCrickard

Read William Kentridge by Kate McCrickard from 2012 Tate publishing.
Great overview with many illustrations.
Page 17; "his bond with the German Expressionists is reciprocal, and the references are looped; the Expressionists took stylistic inspiration from African tribal masks, and now Kentridge looks back to them for his own formal requirements.
Page 20-22, "To him, the art of revered South African landscape painters ... smacked of 'dishonest', unnatural ordering, a propagation of a 'plague of the pastiche'"
Page 29, ... evolving characters, which may be described as leitmotifs, work less through narrative than through associative reference."
Page 45 "Looking at shadows is always finding something we already know. A rational descriptions would be imperfect and arrived at with difficulty. Recognition is immediate and effortless. It describes a different kind of knowledge. It is truth behind the trite adage, 'I know it when I see it'. It understands that the relationship between seeing and knowing is not simple. It proclaims that one does not have to translate what one has seen into a rationalist model before it becomes a usable piece of knowledge". (Kentridge)
Page 55, "The fortuity of failure, so crucial to Kentridge's creative findings, may be linked back to the formal significance of the tear, the shadow and indirect ways of seeing. Tearing and reconstructing images, looking through shadow, and ripping out spreads of antique books, are ways to uncork the creative process and permit an unexpected propagation of images through accident."
Page 62, Kentridge's phenakistoscope described.
Page 65, ants, in negative, used as stars on black sky.
Page 68, re: "Black ox", Brechtian stage work - it's not the traditional view of a willing suspension of disbelief, it's much stronger, more like an unwilling suspension of belief ... look at the pleasure you get from allowing yourself to be deceived" (Kentridge)
Page 77, "Whether you like it or not, who you are is going to come out in the work" (Kentridge).
Page 84, His Majesty the Nose - Kentridge with nose head after Gogol's "The Nose of 1836.
Page 101-103, "An abstract painter might insist their work is just paint but I am saying that's a complete distortion of what it is to be human. It's not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That's what it is to be alive with your eyes open: to be constantly, promiscuously putting things together, getting shapes to have a coherence. IT's a kind of act of aggression against the self to try to stop that? (Kentridge)
Page 117, "Nabokov, writing on Gogol, comments that, 'with Gogol this shifting is the very basis of his art, so that whenever he tried to write in the round hand of literary tradition and to treat rational ideas in a logical way, he lost all trace of talent'. The same could be said of Kentridge, who comes to his work through the underbelly, through accident, through 'failure', through fortuna and through others. ... Kentridge is the first to recognize that the dichotomies, flaws and struggles of the early works are what made them."

The Silent Cinema Reader

The Silent Cinema Reader, edited by Lee Grieveson and Peter Kramer

At the Beginning: motion picture production, representation and ideology at the Edison and Lumiere companies by Charles Musser
Page 16, Points out constructed nature of barber and blacksmith scenes in early Edison (they were sets inside the studio)
Page 17, Blacksmith and drunk on job as nostalgia and ironic.
Edison failed in the iron ore business - effect outlined.

"Now you see it, now you don't": the temporality of the cinema of attractions by Tom Gunning
Page 41-42, early assumptions of primitive cinema: evolutionary (trying to become cinema),  cinematic (discovering cinematic essence), and narrative.
Page 43, "narrative invokes the spectators interest by posing an enigma. The enigma demands a solution ... the art of narrative is delaying the resolution"
Page 44, "Attractions directly addresses the spectator, acknowledging the viewer's presence and seeking to quickly satisfy a curiosity"
Page 45, Role of magician on screen.
Page 49, "enthusiasm the early avant garde had for the aesthetic of attractions ... The gesture of display figured a time that seemed to escape from a linear or successive configuration of time. The potential shock of the cinema of attractions provided a popular form of an alternative temporality based not on the mimesis of memory or other psychological states but on an intense interaction between an astonished spectator and the cinematic smack of the instant, the flicker of presence and absence".

The Kiss in the Tunnel (1899), G.A.Smith and the emergence of the edited film in England by Frank Gray
Page 51, Albert Smith 1st edition of Narrative Sequences, re: not just editing to create trick "Kiss in the Tunnel" (11899) from background as a magic lantern slide presentation.

The Cinema of Attractions in France, 1896-1904 by Richard Abel
no notes

Moving Towards Fictional Narratives: story films become the dominant product, 1903-1904 by Charles Musser
Page 99, "The rapid adoption of the 3-blade shutter on projectors in late 1903-1904 made viewing more pleasurable" suggests part of rise of Nickelodeons and narrative film tied together with tech.

Pathe Goes to Town: French films create a market for the nickelodeon, 1903-1906 by Richard Abel
no notes

Manhattan Nickelodeons: new data on audiences and exhibitors by Ben Singer
no notes

From the Opium Den to the Theatre of Morality: moral discourse and the film process in early American cinema by Tom Gunning
Page 149, "The Biograph Company discontinued production of mutoscopes in 1909, a primary outlet for erotic films" [following censorship board forming]
Page 151, "The redeeming possibilities of motion pictures through the act of being a spectator"
Notes: evolution of narrative form and censorship and moralizing in silent films

How Many Times Shall Caesar Bleed in Sport: Shakespeare and the cultural debate about moving pictures by Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio

Fighting Films: race, morality , and the governing of cinema, 1912-1915 by Lee Grieveson
page 170, 1912 fight film transport law sidestepped by "the film was projected from the Canadian side of the border and recorded in the United States, across a border measuring just a few centimeters."
Page 175, Court decision in 1915 held that film was commerce, not protected under free speech ... "In effect ... motion pictures should avoid documenting ... real life issues and events ... moving pictures should be fictional, entertaining, harmless, and apolitical".

A Star is Born: American culture and the dynamics of Charlie Chaplin's star image, 1913-1916 by Charles J. Maland
Chaplin modification of his humour from vulgar to sympathetic due in part to critics.

An Awful Struggle Between Love and Ambition: serial heroines, serial stars and their female fans by Shelly Stamp
Page 212, with heroine's serials, "at the beginning of many serials, a heroine's seeming independance is conspicuously marked by the loss of a parent or guardian"
Page 213, "only by claiming their lineage or their inheritance can heroines free themselves from danger"  RANIA

Traffic in Souls (1913): an experiment in feature-length narrative construction by Ben Brewster
Early feature "Traffic in Souls" made secretly at Independent Motion Pictures against wishes of head who didn't believe in features. It contains significant amount of parallel action and shorter shots and fewer titles.
Page 229, In 1911, most nickelodeons had only one projector and couldn't do reel changes.

Race, Melodrama, and the Birth of a Nation (1915) by Linda Williams
no notes

The International Exploration of Cinematic Expressivity by Kristin Thompson
In teens, clarity and expressivity in film narrative approach. Essay outlines methods expression improves including lingering on performances, with holding expressions, close up of expression/performance. AN

The Making of a Comic Star: Buster Keaton and The Saphead (1920) by Peter Kramer
Page 281, SLAP STICK "originally referring to two flat pieces of wood joined together at one end, used to produce a loud slapping noise creating the impression of someone having been dealt a hard blow on stage, the term 'slapstick' came to cover various forms of violent comedy"
Page 282, "Keaton's performance stood out both in those scenes where he engaged in traditional slapstick tumbling, that is an excess of activity, and in those where he acted straight, that is with an excess of restraint."

"The Perfect Lover"?: Valentino and ethnic masculinity in the 1920s by Gaylyn Studlar
"molly coddle" = man-woman, also included lounge lizards, cake eaters, boy flappers, tango pirates, flapperoosers.
Page 294, "Radway argues that in Harlequin romances, the male object of desire must undergo 'the imaginative transformation of masculinity to conform to female standards" ... this is accomplished by introduction a feature of softness that tempers the hero's hard masculinity".

The New Woman and Consumer Culture: Cecil B. Demille's sex comedies by Sumiko Higashi
Page 310, "a proliferation of mirror shots in DeMille's Jazz Age films attests to the increasing importance of style over substance"

The Open Door: Hollywood's public relations at home and abroad, 1922-1928 by Ruth Vasey
Page 323, from 1923 onward, Hollywood was shooting abroad as political move by MPPDA.
Page 324, Ethnic villains recast/rewritten as Russians in 1920s. "indeed, as villains, the Russians offered the rare combination of minority market status and recognizable national characteristics. ... In dollars and cents, Russian indignation was cheap".
Page 325, "The American Association for the Advancement of Atheism got short shrift when it complained aout the prejudicial treatment of atheism in The Godless Girl (DeMille, 1929)."

New Notes on Russian Film Culture Between 1908 and 1919 by Yuri Tsivian
Page 340, "in 1912 those film companies in Russia which had a market abroad .. supplementing their films with an export [happy] ending"
Page 342, "Happy End as a program, as Richard Abel has recently shown, began to crystallize around 1908 as part of the American film industry's effort to win its home market from Pathe"
Page 345, "Nie Goni Kartinu! (don't speed up the picture) - still exists in colloquial Russian, now meaning simply "not so fast". "

Early Alternatives to the Hollywood Mode of Production: implications for Europe's Avant-Gardes by Kristin Thompson
Page 356, [1926] German filmmakers provides a detailed sample budget for a feature film ... no expenditure for an editor.
Suggest primary unique qualities of Hollywood are the continuity script (established by 1914) and the job of editor separate from the director. Rob

Art and Industry: German Cinema of the 1920s by Joseph Grncarz
no notes

The Sounds of Early Cinema

The Sounds of Early Cinema, edited by Richard Abel and Rick Altman, 2001, Indiana Press (from UofR library).

Early Phonograph Culture and Moving Pictures by Ian Christie

Page 7, "L'Eve Future", a novel in which a fictional Edison creates a duplicate person.

Early history of sound recording and association with images including idea of artificially preserving the dead. 

Doing for the Eye What the Phonograph Does for the Ear by Tom Gunning

Page 14, (re: Frankenstein) "The nineteenth -century attempt to capture a modern vision involves redefinitions of the act of seeing and of perceptions's relation to the outside world. Key among these, as Crary has shown, was the separation of the senses, the treatment of the human sensorium no longer as a single whole in which the various senses converged to produce a "true" representation of the outside world, but as a bundle of processes, each subject to different physical conditions and processes of stimulation."

Page 15, Charles Cros, poet/inventor, an interesting figure.

Page 16, 1877 phontograph recorded onto tin foil, unsuccessful, was shelved until 1889. 

Page 18-19, Reproduced human beings. 

Page 23, describes American Gothic writing in which characters cannot trust their senses. "The separation of voice from the body ... becomes a dangerous tool that upsets the moral order of the universe". 

Remarks on Writing and Technologies of Sound in Early Cinema by Mats Bjorkin

Page 34, Citing 1987 novel "Inferno", suggests that one man repeating all actions and sounds of another could be a medium himself. 

Pag 35, "Losing control of hearing is more complicated than losing control of vision, because sound normally has to be verified by vision". 

Page 36, When sounds and images could be stored through any medium, the memories of these sounds and images no longer were necessary;p their "liberation" became their end. 

Page 37, "after the phonograph, writing no longer was the only means of representing sound"

'Next Slide Please': The Lantern Lecture in Britain, 1890-1910 by Richard Crangle

Page 39, [turn of the century] contemporary representation show few differences between the lantern lecturer and the moving picture commentator. 

Page 43, word count of lectures was 150 - 200 words per slide (1-2 minutes) for a total of one hour. 

The Voices of Silence by Francois Jost

Page 48, "in spite of standard terminologies, sounds are never produced by images" <see three conditions for An>

Page 49, "The falling stone makes a noise as it drops"

Page 51, Brisson quoted: "Characters must act and must do so clearly and not confusedly, and each of their movements must be expressive as well as produced with an overall coherence through a constant relation of cause and effect". 

"transparency of souls could be achieved only as long as human beings could communicate without resorting to language."

The Event and the Series: The Decline of Cafes-Concerts, the Failure of Gaumont's Chronophone, and the Birth of Cinema as an Art by Edouard Arnoldy

- no notes

Dialogues in Early Silent Screenplays: What Actors Really Said by Isabelle Raynauld

Early films- amateur acting, inprov and random talking on screen. However, later when professional actors from state moved into film, they stuck to the script even when there was no sound recorded. 

The First Transi-Sounds of Parallel Editing by Bernard Perron

Page 84, College Chums (1907) "to express their [telephone] exchange, Porter animates letters, which seem to drift in the air toward the man and the woman, creating a wave connecting the interlocutors. This is a lovely example of a literal transi-sound"

Sound, the Jump Cut, and "Trickality" in Early Danish Comedies by John Fullerton

Page 88, Look for Danish Nordisk Films by Viggo Larsen and photographed by Axel Sorensen (aka Graatkjaer).

Page 90, "often excitement, fear, frustration or anger is figured through gesture"

Setting the Pace of a Heartbeat: The Use of Sound Elements in European Melodramas before 1915 by Dominique Nasta

Page 96, "Subception, or subliminal auditive perception, when voices or music are only simulated visually, one has to find a justification for the inaudible sound"

Page 105, "contrary to what happens in the twenties when the interest shifts to sophisticated scores written for the films, in the early teens the dominant trend is not to pursue the synchronizing practices developed by the Gaumont Chronophone, but to visualize significant pieces of music in films."

Talking Movie or Silent Theater? Creative Experiments by Vasily Goncharow by Rashit M. Yangirov

Page 111, Film/stage combination in 1906 Russia discussed. 

for Rania?

Sleighbells and Moving Pictures: On the Trail of D.W.Robertson by Gregory Waller

Page 123, Chautauqua is a traveling tent variety show t. They had some that held 2000 people. 

The Story of Percy Peashaker: Debates about Sound Effects in the Early Cinema by Stephen Bottomore

Page 136, "selectively indicate the car through a horn, not to imitate it with an engine sound"

This was an entertaining article on history of sfx being performed live at films by "effects boys" from around 1905-ww1

That Most American of Attractions, the Illustrated Song by Richard Abel

Page 150, "Well into 1908, often a majority of the moving pictures shown in nickelodeons were "foreight" (most of them from Pathe). By contrast, illustrated songs were expressly, blatantly "American." If y 1908, as I have argued elsewhere, American films tended to be characterized in teh trade press as "upbeat" in comparison to French films, whose stories increasingly were denounced as "depressing" or "in bad taste, " the distinction was equally in not more valid for illustrated songs. 

"The Sensational Acme of Realism": "Talker" Pictures as Early Cinema Sound Practice by Jeffrey Klenotic

Page 157, "'Talker' films with live actors behind screen, 1907-1908 companies of touring performers esp Humanovo, Actologue, Dramagraph"

"Bells and Whistles": The Sound of Meaning in Train Travel Film Rides by Lauren Rabinovitz

Page 174-175, "Hale's Tours ... were the first virtual realities of the 20th century"
"Early industry accounts reported rather apocryphal stories ... reminiscent of reports about Lumiere films ... members of the audience frequently yelled at pedestrians to get out of the way"

The Noises of Spectators, or the Spectator as Additive to the Spectacle by Jean Chateauvert and Andre Gaudreault

Page 184, [1908-1913] "the sound space of the screening is being organized"
Page 186, "the close up begins to play a crucial role in cinematographic expression at the time the lecturer declines in importance"

Early Cinematographic Spectacles: The Role of Sound Accompaniment in the Reception of Moving Images by Jacques Polet

Page 195, describers 19th century piano imporv leading to virtuosos performing free cadenzas but by 1900, cadenzas were "codified, fixed, rigid" ... "classical music then appears too serious a matter to be left to its performers". ... "Cinema ... did, in a way, re appropriate for itself this area of performative freedom". FOR JONATHAN 

Sounding Canadians: Early Sound Practices and Nationalism in Toronto-Based Exhibition by Marta Braun and Charlie Keil

Page 201-202, "Owen Smily became the most distinguished of the Toronto lecturers".
""Smily not only spoke with a Canadian accent but he directed a school of elocution in which he taught his students the Canadian way of pronunciation. Smily's "Canadian" accent - neither British nor American but something in between - reflects the aspirations of his class at the beginning of the century. A Canadian accent was not an indigenous accent, but rather the product of trying not to be something else.

The Double Silence of the "War to End All Wars" by Germain Lacasse

Page 210-211, Walter Benjamin quoted about silence after war "a necessity because the experience ... was not translatable"  AN

Domitor Witnesses the First Complete Public Presentation of the [Dickson Experimental Sound Film] in the Twentieth Century by Patrick Loughney

- no notes

A "Secondary Action" or Musical Highlight? Melodic Interludes in Early Film Melodrama Reconsidered by David Mayer and Helen Day-Mayer

Page 222-223, Panic of 73 leads to evolution of touring variety theatre in USA, influencing early film.

The Living Nickelodeon by Rick Altman

Music for Kalem Films: The Special Scores, with Notes on Walter C. Simon by Herbert Reynolds

The Orchestration of Affect: The Motif of Barbarism in Breil's The Birth of a Nation Score by Jane Gaines and Neil Lerner

A Geology of Media

A Geology of Media by Jussi Parikka, Electronic Mediations, volume 46, University of Minnesota Press, 2015
Page 14-15, Underground: hell, work.
Page 16, "Underground is the place of repetitious, exploitative and even absurd work of arrangements and rearrangements of partial objects, without a view of the big picture"
Page 17, Anthrpocene = Anthrobscene. refers to 1800 onward period with humans and their interaction with nature.
Page 24-25, Data is literal storage discussed with its need to stay cool "differs from the literary genre of steampunk"
Page 47, Adam Minter cited regarding China and metal. "China leads the world in the consumptionof steel, copper, aluminum, lead, stainless steel, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, platinum, reare earth compounds, and pretty much anything else labeled "metal""
Page 51, list of uses for various metals within electronics/media.
Page 54, Thomas Pynchon's "Against the Day" (2006), a novel ... focused on ... light for the use of ... photography"
Page 70, Dial-a-glacier +44(0)775.7001122
Page 75-76, Telluric currents - "underground flows of electricity"
Page 77, Bram Stoker's Dracula - soil special in London - metaphor of viral code.
Page 83, Snow hills in Finland - first personal story in book that helped me connect to subject matter.
Page 85, ".. dust; not quite of the ground, not quite of the atmosphere"
Page 88, "Material things are often mistaken as modest .. yet the immodest countlessness of dust signals something else"
Page 89, "Molleindustria's Phone Story .... banned on the itunes"
Page 100, Kodak - cotton dust created through use of cotton in base.
Page 101-102, large quote talks about how the residue is not part of what is created.
Page 112, The $40 tablet he purchased in China. Someone asks "Who made it?" to which he replies "Who cares?"
Page 117, Nazi architecture design "in such a way that leaves only honorable lasting ruins for future archaeologists"
Pae 123-124, "Paleofuturism is most dearly articulated in the blog Paleofuture by Matt Novak: it maintains a discourse of past futures that are the fossils of the contemporary"
Page 142-143, History of planned obsolescence
Page 144, "trailing-edge" opposite of cutting edge.
Page 144-145, How to circuit bend.
Page 147, The circuit, not the past, is where media archaeology starts.

The Great Art of Light and Shadow

Finished reading The Great Art of Light and Shadow by Laurent Mannoni (1995, translated from French in 2000). It has an introduction by Tom GUnning and preface by David Robinson. We have a copy in the UofR library but it looked so interesting and important that I wanted to own one. However, it was out of print in Canada so I bought it through amazon.com and had it shipped to Thomas while I was visiting him in Portland in 2013. It is a hefty tome (500+ pages) and is primarily a historical overview of optical devices, beginning with things like shadow and camera obscura and leading up to the beginning of the 20th century. I poked through it slowly for nearly two years then dove in and ready 2/3 of it this month.

Page 55, discussion of first use of word "magic" in regards to magic lantern.
Page 57, lenticular lens or lenticular glass.
Page 58, points out errors in published illustration of lantern from page 57.
Page 72, Chinese emperor introduced to magic lantern and camera obscura.
Page 86, Zograscope - mirror reflecting box.
Page 104, painting water colour vs oil on glass
Page 114, "[Crespi] had learned to touch his fingers lightly onto the paint so that his fingerprints would suggest the marks of an engravers tool"
Page 124, Water filled ball inside projector to magnify light and cool system. Also, early attempt at rectangle frame instead of circular.
Page 151, Glass harmonica described
Page 155, cloth and wax screen built
Page 156, Film "L'Histoire du Cinema vue par le Cinema: Cinema History seen by the Cinema. A 1927 film.
Page 195, steps of making a Degeurotype
Page 203-204, spinning coal to measure persistence of vision - cool exercise.
Page 248-249, ghost mirror
Page 290, etching transfer to glass described vaguely in terms of magic lantern slide production.
Page 309, Muybridge shutter described.
Page 323, Marey and scientific motion studio
Page 325, Proof of four horse hoofs off ground prior to Muybridge
Page 338, Marey's strange series photograph with black paint and shiny metal attached to joints of a performers body called "chronophotographed"
Page 341, Kodak paper negs with first perforations.
Page 402, serpentine dance is "Annabelle Moore imitating the performane of Loie Fuller"
Page 404, Start stop camera to cut off head in "execution of Mary Queen of Scots" film.
Page 425, Lumiere first screening described.
Page 429, Loop in projector invented. 

Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications

Introduction: an archaeology of Media Archaeology by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka
Page 1: "Studies of new media often share a disregard for the past."

Dismantling the Fairy Engine: media archaeology as Topos study by Erkki Huhtamo
Page 28, "The Little People is a topos - a stereotypical formula evokes over and over again in different guises and for varying purposes. "  (the idea that little people are inside the machine).
page 31, "The continued usefulness of the notion of the topos for media archaeology must rely on the assumption that its origins and manifestations are both created and conditioned by cultural forces. "
Page 33, Curtius: "Specialization without universalism is blind. Universalism without specialization is inane".
Page 36-37, cyborgs discussed.

On the Archaeology of Imaginary Media by Erik Kluitenberg
Page 49, "Book of imaginary media" from 2006
Page 55, Peter Blegvad play "On Imaginary Media" distinguishes three general types of media: media remembered, media observed, and media imagined.
Page 56, Siegfried Zielinski on three categories of imaginary media: untimely, conceptual, and impossible.
Page 58, strange prayers described as media.
- EVP: Electronic Voice Phenomena
Page 59, Edison and EVP
- Zoe Beloff on spirit photography. Find Dr. Charles Richet who documented seances with multiple stereoscopic cameras.
Page 60, talking with the dead
Page 61, universal translator from Star Trek.
- Sex substitution through "machines celibataires" or "bachelor machines".  (Karka, Duchamp, Barbarella, Metropolis)
Page 62, being in two places at once.

On the Origins of the Origins of the Influencing Machine by Jeffrey Sconce
Page 71, "technical delusion - the electronic manifestation of 'thought insertion' and/or 'thought broadcasting',  providing subjects with plausible technical explanations as to how their thoughts might have become implanted".
- 1919 paper "On the origins of the influencing machine in schizophrenia"
Page 73-75, early paranoid case study.
Page 81, "Schizophrenics ... identified by inability to process metaphors".
Page 83-84, Radio Mania, radio and thought transferal/surveillance.
Page 85-87 (especially 87) Freud belief in telepathy
Page 89-90, biting critique of blogging.

Freud and the Technical Media: the enduring magic of the wunderblock by Thomas Elsaesser
Much on "mystic writing pad" - the peel off pad, Freud's memory metaphor.
Page 96, archaeology of Freud: "What were the problems Freud thought that his new science of psychoanalysis might help to answer?"
Page 100, Freud as media theorist "body/mind are storage and recording medium"
Page 108, "Time, in Freud, is the protective-compensatory effect of a subjective experience of intermittence of rupture, a failure and loss of signal even, occurring in the transition between recording and storage."
Page 112 Dracula (1897) as commentary on media origins.

The "Baby Talkie," Domestic Media, and the Japanese Modern by Machiko Kusahara
Page 125, "The zograscope is seen in use in a famous woodblock print by Harunobu, Tamagawa inkoya"
Page 130, Kinora - mini-mutoscope for home.
"In Japan there are patent applications from 1932 and 1933 introducing panorama toys for which gramophones are used to automatically scroll the pictures".
Page 137, [Suiho] Tagawa was a former Dada artist, best known for his comic story Norakura (see animation in Pervasive Animation book).

The Observer's Dilemma: to touch or not to touch by Wanda Strauven
Page 152, Thaumatrope, zoetrope etc, interactivity through use of hands.
Page 152-153, Reynaud's praxinoscope theatre (1892) no longer a toy since viewer is not manipulating it.
Page 154, choreutoscope? "The eye is dependent on the hand" Piano/video game correlation.
Page 157, "Rube" film marks evidence and decline of audience /device interaction in early cinema, examples on page 158.

The Game Player's Duty: the user as the gestalt of the ports by Claus Pias
Page 169, Early computer "wirlwind" treats user as a device.
Computer decision making all compared to duty. If you do not follow rules exactly, you lose, just as Homberg is executed for breach of protocol in a war even though he won (page 167).
Page 180 "The discourse elements of the computer game are not called 'killing people' or 'catching gold nuggets' but timeliness, rhythm, or control. And these are continuously tested in a symbolic identity of the player.".

The Enduring Ephemeral, or The Future is a Memory by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Page 184, "a nonsimultaneity of the new, which I argue sustains new media as such"
Page 187, "one must act as though future predictions were fact in order to prevent the predicted future from taking place"
Page 196, "[Mercury delay] tubes memory and RAM explained/compared.
Page 198 "The internet wayback machine (IWM) is necessary because the internet, which is in so many ways about memory, has no memory!"
Page 199, "What makes a blog uninteresting is not necessarily its content, which often reads like a laundry list of things done or to do, but rather its immobility. The ever-updating, inhumanly clocked time in which our machines and memories are embedded and constantly refreshed makes its material stale. "

Erased Dots and Rotten Dashes, or How to Wire Your Head for a Preservation by Paul DeMarinis
Page 212, Analog and digital ... are two concepts with a common origin, although they have been cast as a contra-distinctive pair"
Page 220, Philadelphia's panopticon prison pipes don't go cell to cell so tapped signalling won't happen.
Page 227-228, artist Yasunaotone might relate to Eric Hill.
Page 230, with Sound Designer II software you can draw a waveform using a tablet.

Media Archaeography, method and machine versus history and narrative of media by Wolfgang Ernst
Page 245, tape recorder compared to Ulysses - he had to be tied up to resist temptation of sound while tape can pay equal attention to beautiful and other voices but be unmoved.
Page 247, wire recordings from 1950s available at Milman Parry Collection or Oral Literature at Harvard (web site)
Page 150, "be aware ... that ... human voices or images of the past replayed from media recordings we are not communicating with the dead; rather, we are dealing with the past as a form of delayed presence, preserved in a technological memory."
Page 253, "Since technologies changed from tools to machines, these techniques have comprised not only texts and images but numbers as well. Media archaeology therefore is close to mathematics".

Mapping Noise, techniques and tactics of irregularities, interception, and disturbance by Jussi Parikka
Page 256, "technical media are posthuman media in the sense of addressing a whole other sensorium than that of the human being".
Page 260, 50% redundancy in English "helps combat noise".
Page 268, "As Carolyn Marvin notes, poems that served as light filler in electrical journals often identified woman as technological objects under male control. Yet the huge number of women working as interconnectors in telegraph offices, as secretaries with typing machines, and later as telephone operators were uncertain elements, probably because of their imagine cultural status as unreliable and emotional".
Book: Haunted Media by Jeffery Sconce
Page 268-270, ghosts, spirits, aliens inmachine.
Page 271, "I love you project to archive viral code"

Objects of Our Affection, how object orientation made computers a medium by Casey Alt
History of computers from"computing" machine to "media" machine, mainly through evolution of object orientation and systems theory.
Page 287, "Thus, for Kay, who understands object orientation at such a deep and intimate material level, the question of the relationship between object orientation and mediality is so obvious as to be tautological and, therefore, a nonquestion".
Page 295, "Like Bergson before him, Deleuze thus considered the material universe to be a vast, vibrating assemblage of all material movement-images acting and reacting to one another in a jittery field of unfolding relationality."
Page 297-298, McLuhen interpretation.

Digital Media Archaeology, interpreting computational processes by Noah Wardrip-Fruin
Page 302, "Christopher Strachey's 1952 loveletter generator for the Manchester Mark I"
Page 310, Queneau and Le Lionnais's "One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems" generator using flip strips for each line of sonnet.

Afterward, media archaeology and re-presencing the past by Vivian Sobchak
Page 328 "... media archaeologists are still romantics - albeit also self satirists." 

Lovers of Cinema

Over past couple weeks, I read; "Lovers of Cinema; the first American film avant-garde, 1919-1945", edited by Jan-Christopher Horak, 1995.


The First American Film Avant-Garde, 1919-1945, by Jan-Christopher Horak
Page 14-15, "the 1950s avant-gardists proclaimed themselves to be independent filmmakers, actively engage in the production of 'art', while the earlier generation viewed themselves as cineastes, as lovers of cinema, as 'amateurs' willing to work in any arena furthering the cause of film art, even if it meant working for hire"
Page 19, "Professionalism was equated with commercialism, while amateurism connoted artistic integrity. This discourse also identifies personal expression with formal experimentation, a dualism repeated continually in contemporary  aesthetic manifestos and reviews, and echoed in the polemics of the second American avant-garde.""
Page 21, 1926 re-release of Caligari.
Page 27, shady distributors.
Page 29, [early avant-garde] "demonstrated a certain wild eclecticism, innovativeness, and at times naivete that was only possible for American filmmakers."
Page 30, American romanticism, which manifests itself in a longing for (wo)man's reunification with nature".
Page 33, neoriealist 1931 "Cityof Contrasts" with comical soundtrack.
Page 36, "Nature as a visual metaphor for the expression of human subjectivity"
Page 44, "introspection" by Sara Aledge
Page 45, "Lullaby" by painter Boris Deotsch is "reminiscent of Caligari" (image on page 46).
Page 51, Theodore Huff parody films "starred children, giving the films an ambiguous sexuality and implicating the subject in the director's slightly perverse gaze".
Page 51, William Vance's "Hearts of the Age" (1934) was, according to Orson Wells, a parody of "Blood of a Poet".
Page 52, Satirical film about making surreal film "Evan As You and I" by Roger Barlow, Harry Hay, and Leroy Robbins.

The Limits of Experimentation in Hollywood by Kristin Thompson
Page 84-85, "Beggers on Horseback" (1925) was widely seen as the first major Hollywood film influenced by German Expressionism"

Robert Florey and the Hollywood Avant-Garde by Brian Taves
Bio and stories about Robert Florey who made four films with enthusiastic help from Hollywood.

Americans in Paris, Man Ray and Dudley Murphy by William Moritz
Page 120, funny story about Man Ray having dispute over distribution and then stealing and disassembling a film.
Page 126, more Man Ray stories.
Page 121-127, Dudley Murphy story - who would be the deleted collaborator on the Legar film "Ballet Mechanique".
Page 130, "Sports Parade" by Murphy in 1932 is compared to "Wavelength".

Startling Angles: amateur film and the early avant-garde by Patricia Zimmermann
Page 137, 1923 article "The Importance of Doing Things Badly" (find?)
Page 139, "amateur film, whether reproducing Hollywood narrative style or experimenting with film form, was located within a discourse searching for a revival of artistic dignity through the integrity of individual filmmaking"
Page 149-150, "Cinematic Design", 1931 book by Leonard Hacker, "explicated form, rhythm, color, and relativity in motion pictures".

U.S. Modernism and the Emergence of "The Right Wing of Film Art"; the films of James Sibley Watson, Jr., and Melville Webber by Lisa Cartwright
Page 157, "Watson claims that he and Webber selected the Poe story as the basis for their first film collaboration precisely because they had not read it in ten or fifteen years, and therefore would be free of its influence".
Page 159, The Dial: "a transcendentalist quarterly of religion and the arts ... explores mysticism and progressive revision of Christian doctrine in the light of modern science".
Page 169-170, EE Cummings' role in The Fall of the House of Usher.
Page 171, Ezra Pound influence on ee cummings via Vortisism.
"attachment of a gyroscope to the shutter, and the substitution of a prismatic ring in place of the shutter"
Page 172, Geometry and poetry and film.
Page 173, Photo of Sodom optical printer.

Theodore Huff; historian and filmmaker by Chuck Kleinhans
Page 183, Huff is an intellectual generalist and "an intellectual handyman". Wrote first book on Chaplin.
Page 187, "amateur contests ... reveal a gap between ambition and accomplishment"
Page 197, Huff collected stills and large collection of silent film music and cue sheets.
Page 202, "FOOF" = Friend of old film.

Ralph Steiner by Scott MacDonald
Page 209, "the 87 second passage that immediately follows the 'question mark' is, in my view, teh most beautiful in the film ... exquisite imagery".
Pge 212, "effects that some independent and industry filmmakers labor years to create ... are, Steiner proves, available to anyone willing to look more carefully at he world".
Page 220, "organized religion and the film industry ... ignored the realities of hunger in favor of empty illusionism"
Pie In The Sky: "subjective camera images became self reflexive moments"
Page 222, Hands: government propaganda film by Steiner.
Page 224-225, The City; compared to Koyaanisqatsi.

Straight Shots and Crooked Plots: Social documentary and the avant-garde in the 1930s by Charles Wolfe
Page 235, Grierson's and others one line definitions of "documentary", a new term in the 1930s.
Page 237, Leger's writings quoted on fundamental materials of photographic art.

Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler's Manhatta by Jan-Christopher Horak
Page 267, "Manhatta is in fact central to film modernism's project of deconstructing Renaissance perspective in favor of multiple, reflexive points of view"
Page 278, argument supporting the intertitles as part of the original plan.

The City Viewed; the films of Leyda, Browning, and Weinberg by William Uricchio
Page 287, list of city films of the 1930s.
Page 288, alternatives to description (travelogues) or interpretation (Nanook of the North) is offered by avant-garde.
Page 292, shift from an essentially romantic tradition of self-expression to a socially engaged and often critical aesthetic.

Mary Ellen Bute by Lauren Rabinovitz

Page 317, "Tension between film's elitist modernist aesthetics and their popular reception as pretty amusements."  (thought: is this why McLaren is not written about as a/g filmmaker?)

Page 319, Brute and Leon Theremin with the color organ. 

Page 324, Collaboration with McLaren (Spook Sport)

Page 326, "she adopted the oscilloscope as her 'true pencil of light'"

Page 328, "her publicity statements especially opposed the modernist distanciation from mass tastes"

Machines That Give Birth to Images; Douglss Crockwell by Tom Gunning
Page 335, A/G flmmakers "filmmaking not only defined [his/her] lifestyle, it also subsumed it"
Page 336, "Charles Ives ... noted that innovative ideas seem to be more readily accepted in business than in official American culture and academia" (then more discussion of affect of teaching careers).
Page 337, "[Crockwell's] commercial work ... was produced with the traditional hand directed tools ... his experimental work .. was a product of machines".
Page 340, "Crockwell's machines were created... in imitation of, and homage to... the mutoscope"
Page 341, "While the projected motion pictures ... were inspired by ... magic lantern slides ... the peep show devices ... derive from such single-viewer devices as the stereoscope".
Page 342, Mutoscope remained limited to brief doses of scopic pleasure, an attraction associated with either eroticism or pure curiosity, lacking clearly defined social benefits."
Page 343, discuss sequential art in terms of mutoscope. Word: "simulacrum" which Christine cites "Disneyland" as an example.
Page 346-347, quoting Crockwell: "others have allowed the music to dominate, even to keying every motion to a musical beat. I believe the beauties of abstract animation in their own right"
Page 352, Crockwell describes wax animation he patented: "this solid block contains within itself the past, present and future of an animated sequence suspended in time" and goes on to refer to 4 dimensional objects.
Page 353, "enduring paradoxes of modern culture - the extraordinary exchange of connotations that take place between machines and sexuality"
Page 355, "At the turn of the century, motion pictures were initially exhibited as demonstrations of the apparatus that photographed and projected them, rather than simply images on the screen. ... Quite rapidly, however, the subject matter of the film or the name of the production company took pride of place, and the apparatuses were tucked away, far from the public's view. Except, of course, for the amusement arcade mutoscope.."