CURSOR8
CURSOR8: Origination (PT. 1); Moving interpolations to filmic dimensional transportation systems (Internal and Environmental); in spite of non-conducive business models
Paul McLean
For a presentation in Humanities 340 (Research Tool for the Digital Humanities)
INTRODUCTION: A NEW DIMENSIONAL FORMAT AND STRUCTURE
As a precursor to effective action, verifying a need for digital humanities projects in the context of a significant reformation of infrastructure for cultural production is sensible. Cultural production is a Marxian euphemism that encompasses creative activities in old and new media. “Cultural production” as a working term is problematic in its breadth. For the purposes of CURSOR, we are focused centrally on the visual arts as our prime subject, because visual, and more specifically, fine art is indicative in the overarching net/framework of a society’s valuation of free speech, as it applies in the political, economic and social sectors. In short, how we treat art and artists shows how much we care about expressive liberty. As we will see, the state of free expression in a state will reveal the state’s capacity for sustainable growth and provide a fair measure of equitable quality of life. Further, we will recognize the intricate connections between art (free speech/freedom) and the characteristics of government (representation/accountability) in relation to business and community responsiveness or efficacy, as presupposed in cultural fluency.
From an Arts and Humanities perspective, it is imperative that environmental support systems necessary to sustain the infrastructure for the “Arts” side to be addressed. In short, we must consider that artists make art in real time. In a dimensional framework, the role of the artist, at least from my POV, is to demonstrate, for all, the combinative procedures (and humanitarian benefits) in operation on a 4D project.
As we approach a terminal point for our discussion of old and new media, it is worthwhile to profile a functional modern society. One assumes agreement that the Arts and Humanities would be motivated by definition to contribute to the functionality of modern society, perhaps especially in the area of cultural wellness. One should also be able to assume that rest of a society’s knowledge pool, namely the sciences in their variegated permutations, would also be allied with this motivation, to improve society. Even the econ/business sector, which one could argue in our modern society has for several hundred years been the prime beneficiary of the advances in Arts & Humanities/Sciences (Math), would identify its main justification for existence as service to the betterment of people in society. At least that was Peter Drucker’s stated motivation, ultimately. (I would argue that the business sector allows the jury to be out, on this particular point, poising its mission substantively in the space between communal and individual satisfaction of needs, to use the Druckerist schema.) Let us for the sake of argument assume, at least in the beginning, that all three legs of the academic stool prop up a shared platform, a motivation to improve society, and the lives of people and the general functionality of civilization. Certainly the disciplines diverge in their applications and specialities.
With this as our premise, perhaps it is helpful to engage in some spot check analysis of the state of the state of the art. Hopefully, this will help us to generate a justification for an innovative alliance between old methods and new technology, or old technology and new sensibilities, or old values and new dimensional potential.
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MEDIATION IN THE ART BUSINESS
[Note: The following introduction (to CURSOR8 discussion) is excerpted from The Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture, “Organization of Arts and Entertainment Industries,” Section 2.4 (Agents and matchmakers)]
The artist-gatekeeper relationship frequently involves an agent who mediates between artists and the enterprises that realize the market value of their creations. These intermediaries perform several services, depending on the creative sector. One is matchmaking between artists with heterogeneous talents and creative enterprises with diverse capabilities and input needs. Another is negotiating terms between artist and gatekeeper. As a third, the agent himself functions as gatekeeper when he selects artists to represent.
The service ostensibly provided by the agent is to represent the artist (author, say) to enterprises that might bring her work to market (publishers). This representation function is governed by an incentive contract that compensates the agent with a share (traditionally 10 percent but with upward perturbations) of the artist’s gross earnings. This contract (including the 10 percent figure) was established in the nineteenth century at the inception of the agency business, quickly displacing a fee-for-services contract because of authorial poverty as well as the incentive value [Hepburn (1968)]. Besides representation, however, the agent performs a gatekeeping service that would otherwise fall entirely on the publisher. The agent can profitably undertake to represent an author only if the time (effort) devoted to seeking an outlet for her work is expected to reap sufficient compensation from the resulting royalties. The agent may also invest time (effort) in editing and improving the author’s work, to the point where a publishing-house editor can appreciate its potential. Now consider the dealings that occur between the established agent and editors employed by publishing houses. They interact repeatedly, which increases the editor’s credence in an agent’s pitch on its/his author’s behalf. The agent will suffer a pecuniary loss from devoting effort to an author of indifferent promise – a substantial up-front opportunity cost with poor long-run prospects for compensation. For the publisher, relying on agents’ representations (their gatekeeping skills and quality signals) substitutes dependence on what can be picked from the “slush pile” of unsolicited manuscripts. That is likely less efficient matchmaking procedure because the publisher pondering an unchaperoned manuscript lacks the information that the agent draws from personal contact with the author.
While the agent’s gatekeeping and representation functions benefit the publisher, the agent’s skill at negotiating on the author’s behalf is adversary. Publishers offer somewhat differentiated bundles of services, but none capable of generating substantial rents. The author’s unique manuscript is the one input into the publication venture with rent-yielding potential. Thus over the years the publisher’s one-time share of subsidiary rights for paperback, cinema film, and other such derivative products has eroded, as the agent representing the author came to pre-empt the publisher and take over the auctioning of subsidiary rights. The publisher’s gains from the agent’s gatekeeping function thus trade against the publisher’s reduced share of rents from subsidiary rights.
Akin to the gatekeeping role of agents is the function of certifiers who possess or invest in skills at making fine judgments on the quality of artists or their works. Theoretical research has recently turned to characterizing the market for certifiers’ services, including vertical differentiation of their services [Hvide and Heifetz (2001)]. The critic’s economic function in creative industries has not been much studied, but on casual evidence seems to possess some analytically interesting features. Major acquisitions of visual art excepted, the individual’s decision to consume a creative good is too small a transaction to warrant a large outlay on an advisor’s services. So critical opinion is commonly bundled into magazines or newspapers along with complementary sorts of information. The amount of criticism supplied then depends on its marginal attraction to consumers of the bundle relative to their marginal valuations of other content. Critical services seem subject to vertical differentiation parallel to the differentiated involvement of consumers in various arts and entertainment industries. That is, the utility one gets from consuming creative goods increases with one’s accumulated “cultural consumption capital” – built up from previous experience and both specialized and general training [Stigler and Becker (1977)]. Individuals vary in both aptitude and desire for building such stocks of consumption capital. As a result they tend to distribute themselves between the poles of “buff” and “casual” in their involvement. The judgments offered by critics and certifiers tend to display a parallel vertical differentiation, with reasoned and contextualized evaluations provided for the buffs, while the critic servicing the casuals tends to internalize their standards and opine whether or not they will like the work.
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QUESTIONS
How does the digital humanities approach, as indicated by so-called Web 2.0 open source software platforms, serving networked computer-based communities, displace the arrangements among players described above? In the DH format, who are the agents, artists, publishers and critics, and most importantly, the audience? What role does software play?
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The headline from the New York Times digital edition at 7:02 ET, today (August 20, 2009):
A-List Stars Flailing at the Box Office
By BROOKS BARNES 14 minutes ago (at the time it was copied – PJM)
Studios aren’t giving up on stars but they are trying to pay them less or looking for cheaper alternatives.
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In the section directly above, we glimpse two media domains that are in crisis: the daily printed newspaper, and the Hollywood star vehicle (or the blockbuster cinema studio system). Both are part and parcel of the American vision of itself. Who can forget Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane? Of course, in the trajectory of the arts in history, that is a loaded question. We have after all been exploring the qualities of timelines. Forgetfulness is the ever-present opposition to the creative action. With this in mind, I will project a dimensional proposition: that Citizen Kane presciently describes as a panoramic or dimensional morality tale the arc of the American newspaper and movie industries, as embodied in the lead character’s tragic downfall.
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We haven’t discussed cinema much in CURSOR, but at this stage of our exploration, putting movies on the table is helpful, for several reasons. First is the traditional production structure of filmmaking. Generally, making a film is a very collaborative process. Within the collaborative framework, the directors and actors are assigned a high degree of artistry or authorship, usually more than the rest of the cast and crew (possibly excepting writers). Still, the celebration of quality work in all facets of film production is what makes the Oscars so lengthy. Clearly, in the culture of Hollywood, stardom is a flat or horizontal effect.
This lateral cultural phenomenon is pervasive. In the past century the moving image camera has informed positively or negatively all media exchanges, and arguably the global human sense of itself. “Movie magic” is the term, and the glorification of cinema’s capacity for shaping the inner and exterior environment, transfixing and transporting the imagination, and opening portals to other realities, is the stuff of many a waxing cinephile’s lyric: the stuff of dreams.
Even if our discussion didn’t address cinema directly, it did however explore the mechanics of cinema fairly comprehensively. We looked at Muybridge, Eakins and Gilbreth, who popularized the sequential image, which is the armature for film. We traced the evolution of the pictorial dimension, from Socrates’ complaint through the Baroque, to the digital present. Most significantly, in dimensional considerations, we explored the timeline.
As a representation of history, the cinematic timeline is a starting point for a great discussion of the space between. In cinematic film, the movie presents the sequence of images on a vertical plane and a horizontal linear timeline. It is the speed of presentation of the horizontal, linear image progression that fools the human eye into accepting film’s illusionistic movement. Suspension of disbelief, camera POV, the edge of the projection, the separation between the viewer and the action, 3D film and many other phenomena put cinema directly on our dimensional table, which we will say is now is the cutting table. Editing is the key to bridging film and digital media for cinema.
How has the computer and digital video technology expanded film? For one thing, it dissolved the space between, and it added the features of 4D interventions and trans-polations to what was essentially a cut-and-splice, linear, or 2D process. Until the introduction of the computer-based editing suite, the director and the cinematographer collaborated with the actors to simulate the multiplicity of perspective to calculate a narrative omniscience, whereby the filmmaker or his cinematic proxy (and the viewer, by extension), could experience the action dimensionally. After the digital editor entered the scene, the manipulation of perspective to encompass all-overness emerged as an integral tool in the cinematic toolbox. Once the flatness of the film screen had been so transfigured, even if the animation was in fact unchanged (still flat), the movie could unfold in multiple directions simultaneously. In short order, the capacities of the digital format, its infinite possibilities to reduce or expand in all directions for the purpose of editing content, inspired filmmakers to imagine worlds in which film was situated as a medium, worlds that themselves could expand and contract infinitely. Context and content began to function as connected animations.
The influence of 20th century painters on this phenomenon cannot be underestimated. Those we have cited previously in CURSOR occupy leadership positions on the list of contributors to film’s dimensional expansion. That said the bigger picture is bigger than Mondrian, Pollack and the filmic innovators, counterparts like Stan Brackage. What our investigation has revealed is the connection between today’s cinema and thousands of years of technical progression, not to fool the eye (trompe l’oeil), but to expand perception dimensionally beyond the wall of the “real.”
