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October 9, 2003
Destination Digital: Where do You Want to Go?
I'm not sure how to relate this entry to my previous one other than to link them and to comment that I read both essays this afternoon and evening...
At any rate, I came across Andrew Utterson's essay, "Destination Digital: Documentary Representation and the Virtual Travelogue," in QRFV, in which Utterson argues that Internet webcams and virtual tours offer a useful means for addressing several key issues pertaining to the status of the documentary image. Utterson drwas the comparison between virtual tours and the actuality films of early cinema, which I think is a useful move, especially when he ties the "generic aesthetics" of early cinema to the "introduction and marketing of new technologies" (194). I argue the experimentation with time in early cinema is intimately bound with the marketing and reception of these early films, especially in the "trick" films of Melies, for example.
But when Utterson turns to digital technologies, to webcams and virtual tours, I become suspicious of his claims. He writes:
An infinite series of remotely situated cameras gives us instant access to multiple, simultaneous sites of geographical actuality. Negotiating the limits of physical travel, the webcam's immedaitely relayed streams of images, like the cinema before it, begin to break down the primary constraints of physicality. However illusory or hypothetical, the sense of global connectedness associated with the webcam arouses the possibility of existing simultaneously within multiple locations, as we logon to a transglobal, hyperreal alternative to everyday life and domesticity. (194 emphasis mine)Perhaps I'm being picky (it's been known to happen), but I don't feel like his description of the illusion of immediacy offered by webcams sufficiently distinguishes itself from television's appearnce of immediacy, especially the satellite systems that offer hundreds of channels and convey themselves as "live" transmissions. Of course, there is the matter of "control," in that webcam surfers may be able to control the direction of the camera, whether it pans, tilts, or tracks across a given space, but I don't think that the liveness of the digital per se can be seen as crucially different than the liveness of television (at least as it is explained here).
I'm equally skeptical of Utterson's observation that webcams offer even the "illusory or hypothetical" experience of existing in two places simultaneously. When I click on (my originally word choice, visit, might undercut my own argument, BTW) EarthCam or Armchair Travel Company, I don't have the sense that I exist in two different places. I am aware of the fact that my radio is playing in the background, that crickets are chirping outside my window. If I'm in the computer lab at school, I worry that someone might walk up and look over my shoulder and think that I'm being lazy by surfing to look at the webcam sites I just mentioned. I think that what Utterson describes is a useful and popular fiction, one that might be used to market web technologies (if I read correctly the Armchair Traveler requires a paid membership), for example.
His larger question about the ability of digital technologies to sustain the veracity of the image that is so important to documentary forms also needs to be challenged. Cinematic documentaries have always been prone to manipulation. Even the early example of The Execution of Czoglosz combines actuality footage with a re-enactment of the execution. Every cut, every movement of the camera, involves a choice to exclude something else.
I didn't intend to be so critical of Utterson's essay, and I'm still trying to articulate why I'm so resistant to these claims about the digital. I know that my resistance relies somewhat on my ambivalence about claims about the immersion and immediacy of the digital, but one answer might be found here in Jason's discussion of studying games, specifically when he refers to the decision-making processes required in role-playing games. I don't have much experience with RPGs, and the degree of identification one has with one's character might indicate one version of this type of immediacy.
Andrew at Grand Text Auto also seems to be tackling the problem of "immediacy" in the gaming world (Wow: I didn't realize GTA was affiliated with Georgia Tech).
Posted by chuck at October 9, 2003 9:43 PM
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