James J. Hodge

Digital Psycho: Dedramatizing the Historical Event

1. Unsurprising Events It’s 1960, and a woman onscreen disrobes and steps into a motel shower. Behind the curtain a shadow appears, arm raised, knife in hand. As the signature moment in one of the most iconic works in film history, the shower scene cements Psycho’s status as a quintessential film historical event, indeed one of the defining media historical events of the twentieth century. Not only did Psycho indisputably change the course of cinema history, it changed the way people took showers. Psycho transformed the atmosphere of the ordinary. Fast forward to the twenty-first century. As Jacques Derrida says, “an event implies surprise, exposure, the unanticipatable.” While Derrida’s words aptly evoke Psycho’s historical reputation, they don’t really describe my students’ reactions to the film. Instead, they report feeling, in a word, unsurprised. Although these blasé reactions may be attributed to a number of factors, I am only interested in one possibility: something has happened to the event itself. But, first, I want to ask why so many digital media artworks employ Psycho only to undo its spine-tingling sensationalism. This question requires attending to another, more recent shift in the atmosphere of the ordinary: the saturation of contemporary life by digital media. This story

Earth-Specific Art: Phenomenology and the Digital Cinema of Peter Bo Rappmund

Is it possible to speak of the Earth as a site? If so, would some kinds of site-specific art be specific to the Earth, as Earth-specific? One may immediately object to such questions on the grounds that no art has been produced on any other known planet—even if art does in some instances exist beyond the Earth.1 Even without the benefit of possible empirical comparison, the speculative question of Earth-specific art gains urgency as an unthought legacy of site-specific aesthetics going back at least to Robert Smithson’s iconic Spiral Jetty (1970). Requiring helicopters, film, and photography to view and experience, Spiral Jetty remains inseparable from the media technologies employed in its documentation and representation.2 More fundamentally, Spiral Jetty broaches the question of whether site specificity itself is a function of a work’s relation to human cognition and perception. Addressed less to human individuals than to the weather, to deep time, and to the affordances of technological mediation beyond direct experience, Spiral Jetty tests the limits of aesthetic experience for the multiple ways it evokes a sense of the Earth as at least partially not for us. Today, this legacy of indifference to the human that underlies some forms of site-specific aesthetics looms even larger, especially at the intersection of media theory and eco-aesthetics. JameS J. hodge is Assistant Professor in the department of English and the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities at Northwestern University. His essays on digital aesthetics have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Postmodern Culture, Film Criticism, and elsewhere. His book project, Animating History: New Media Art and the Opacity of Digital Experience, argues that animation transforms historical experience in the digital age. He can be reached at james.hodge@ northwestern.edu.