William Uricchio

Beyond the Great Divide Collaborative Networks and the Challenge to Dominant Conceptions of Creative Industries

The term ‘creative industries’ has different patterns of deployment. The main fault lines have traditionally appeared between the US, where the marketplace and consumer rule, and much of the rest of the world, where notions of the cultural public sphere and citizenship remain relevant (if under siege). But peer-to-peer (P2P) networks and open source software communities may offer an unexpected challenge to these two constructions. The realignment of the citizen/consumer divide, brought about by the blurring of producer/consumer relations and the requirements of citizenship in digitally enabled communities, holds the possibility for a redefined notion of creative industries.

The algorithmic turn: photosynth, augmented reality and the changing implications of the image

The digital turn, and with it increased use of location-aware technologies, has yielded innovative image applications and posed new questions about the status and value of the image. These applications rely on algorithmically defined relations between the viewing subject and the world viewed, offering robust alternatives to the visual economies of the past. If we take seriously Heideggers insights regarding the Welt-bild as a metaphor for the modern era, the algorithmic reconfiguration of subject-object relations in this emerging visual regime potentially offers insights through which we can reflect upon the current era – and a metaphoric alternative. This article uses two entry points to explore this possible reconfiguration and, with it, the question of value. Downloadable applications such as Photosynth aggregate location-tagged photographs into a near-seamless whole, and offer a way to consider such issues as collaborative authorship of the image, unstable points of view and the repositioning of subject-object relationships – all elements that fundamentally challenge western representational norms dominant in the modern era. In this new regime, the spatial referents of greatest value are points of uniqueness sought out and built upon by the programs algorithms – and not those perceived by the viewer. The viewer is in turn free to explore an extensive and dynamic image space unconstrained by (and, indeed, without access to) an authorised or ‘correct’ viewing position. A second case, built upon certain augmented reality applications, works by ‘recognising’ particular spaces and, through the use of computationally enhanced viewing screens, superimposing new images over real space. In this case, a system of virtual spatial annotation depends upon the ‘correct’ positioning of the viewer (and portable computing device) in the world. The two cases stand in a roughly reciprocal relationship, turning on different notions of algorithmic intermediation and subject-object relations and dynamics for the generation of meaning and value.

A ‘proper point of view’: The panorama and some of its early media iterations

The panorama entered the world not as a visual format but as a claim: to lure viewers into seeing in a particular way. Robert Barker’s 1787 patent for a 360-degree painting of ‘nature at a glance’ (Nature à Coup d’Oeil) emphasized the construction of a ‘proper point of view’ as a means of making the viewer ‘feel as if really on the spot’. This situating strategy would, over the following centuries, take many forms within the world of the painted panorama and its photographic, magic lantern, and cinematic counterparts. This essay charts some of the unexpected twists and turns of this strategy, exploring among others the moving panorama (both as a parallel development to the cinematic moving picture and as deployed by the film medium as a background to suggest movement) and the relations between the spatial promise of the late nineteenth-century stereoscope and that most populous of early motion picture titles, the panorama. The essay focuses on changing technologies and strategies for achieving Barker’s initial goals, while attending to the implications for the viewer. Drawing from the observations of scholars as diverse as Bentham, Foucault, and Crary, the essay uses the various iterations of the panorama to explore the implications of a particularly rich strand of technologies of seeing.

Contextualizing the Broadcast Era: Nation, Commerce, and Constraint

Programming scarcity that characterized the broadcast era, or what this article refers to as constraint , served very different goals. Often intertwined, these goals ranged from the formation of an ideologically coherent national public, to the protection of economic self-interest, to the explicit promotion of products and messages. They were deployed rather differently in the commercial American and state/public European spaces of television. The article explores a number of assumptions regarding the institution and medium of television that have persisted from the broadcast era into our own and that might well, given the very different structures of contemporary television, be repositioned. It outlines the contours of that repositioning, sketching the implications for some of our theoretical and methodological defaults.

Film, cinema, television … media?

What is left for film studies if we strip away narrative, representation, and the dominant practices of institutional cinema? Is there an essence or medium specificity to study, or might we instead simply focus on the contingent permutations that film and other media undergo, this time in the digital age? Using the intertwined histories of film, cinema, and television, this paper renders contingent their normative definitions and provides a way to rethink their study in a time of transition.

A Palimpsest of Place and Past

How does one perform memory? And in particular, how does one perform cultural memory, or what generally passes as history? This essay looks back to the ancient practices of the memory arts and ahead to todays location-based digital technologies, considering machines for the performance of memory. It begins by disambiguating the subtle but important distinctions between the projects of the memory palace and Camillos theatre of memory, distinguishing the performance of space characteristic of the palace from the memory theatres space of performance. Camillos theatre introduced a new twist to the memory palace, functioning in some senses as a memory machine and requiring of its users a particular kind of performance. The essay explores these differences and their implications for thinking about performative navigation and the meanings bound up within the city as a historically accrued repository of material practices and subjectivities. We continue to have access to the citys materialities, of course, but how can we recover its experiential contingencies and the ephemeral views of its inhabitants? How might we give voice to its pluriform significance? How can we activate, articulate and put into play these assignments of meaning? The essay explores these questions and the possibilities of using location-based digital technologies as machines for the performance of urban space and memory. It extends the analogy of Camillos creation, in which the scholar-spectator inhabits a physical theatre and generates memories through interaction with an elaborate and logical system of all knowledge, to the smartphone or iPad-equipped flâneur-spectator, doing something similar in his wanderings of the city. Location-aware technologies together with vast databases combine to generate personalized assemblages of public information, rendering any particular location – like Camillos theatre – a space of performance.

Television studies’ shifting disciplinary status: Anglo-American developments

The history of the moving image is embedded in a changing fabric of cultural anticipation and reception. Already in the last quarter of the 19th century, competing conceptions of and technological strategies for the moving image struggled for dominance. Behind this process lurked a series of assumptions regarding vision and its extension and/or reproduction that would be given voice in the course of early identity debates over the film medium, or again during the early years of television’s deployment as it sought to distinguish itself from radio and film, or even again in our present as we face the introduction of new representational technologies. In our century, of course, film and television have emerged as the two dominant moving image technologies, and consequently much of the debate has tended to center on their processes of mutual identity construction. Given the film medium’s apparent primacy, at least as institutional and cultural practice, one can read television’s own cultural history as being self-consciously constructed around (and away from) certain perceptions of the cinematic.

Dante's Inferno and Caesar's Ghost: Intertextuality and Conditions of Reception in Early American Cinema

at a theoretical level, with theory delimiting the evidence base. Fewer scholars have as yet taken up the daunting challenge of historical reception studies, which requires dealing with living subjects’ memories of initial reception or speculating about the reception of long-silent subjects. In both cases,the restricted evidence base presents immense theoretical complexities. In this paper, we wish to discuss the conditions of reception for two films made by the Vitagraph Company in 1908, Francesca di Rimini and Julius Caesar. Vitagraph’s prominence amongst American film producers would have insured that these films were widely distributed and widely seen. Vitagraph, one of the three most important of pre-Hollywood American film studios, exceeded its closest rivals, the Edison and Biograph Companies, in both film production and scale of operation Z An energetic and innovative publicity department helped the studio maintain its high public profile, advertising directly to film distributors and exhibitors through its in-house organ and constantly planting stories in the trade press. In an era when studio &dquo;brand&dquo; loyalty seems to have been a major determinant of film attendance, the Vitagraph name on a film most probably ensured good audience turnout. While Vitagraph’s status permits us to conclude that both Francesca da