Sleepwalking into the Future

J.J. King visits the Rotterdam International Film Festival's 'Exploding Cinema' and 'What is Cinema' programmes and asks whether 'old' media is competent to study the questions left behind by the death of the 'new'.

How do paradigms change? What is it that drives shifts in belief, value and technique? For Gerhard Lenski, it's 'productive technology': Lenski promotes the part played in social change by productive technologies such as written language (which, he argues, extended the possibility of collective memory and facilitated the specialisation of individuals in particular kinds of knowledge.) This is merely one flavour of technological determinism: it comes in dozens, all of them equally distasteful to social scientists. For some, such as the late French scholar Jacques Ellul, technology is the most powerful force in modern life, moving according to its own logic, well beyond the control of people. Others, such as the political theorist Langdon Winner, give technology influence in the making of modern life, but have humans retain primacy in deciding which technologies are developed. Unfortunately, says Winner, humans do not pay enough attention to the of technologies that are developed and deployed; instead, we seem to be 'sleepwalking' into a future we haven't properly considered.

In the last five to ten years, we in the new media community have thought a lot about communications technology, and learned a lot about what doesn't drive change. The World Wide Web, which came into general public awareness in the early to mid 90s, transformed the Internet into a public resource: a new and potently productive technology. Those who were prepared to guess at the Web's social and economic ramifications - the changes that would be effected through its use - became pundits, gurus, consultants and some of them, in the latter stages of the new media revolution, even ended up as 'dot.com millionaires'. Yet in all that time, as many would now openly admit, there was very little happening that was really revolutionary. In retrospect, it's obvious that the chief productive potentials of the Web were realised very early on; and that all the cacophony of discussions that went on about innovation after this realisation were 'full of sound and fury,/ Signifying [and producing] nothing.'

For the past four years, the Rotterdam International Film Festival has hosted a series of discussions and screenings under the heading 'Exploding Cinema'. This programme, curated by Femke Wolting, new media practitioner and co-director of the Dutch digital media company Submarine, had been part of new media's ongoing attempts to understand, question, develop and market itself - often within the closed circuit of the industry - while in the Festival at large, the business of film proper continued more or less unchallenged. Exploding looked at all things 'digital' - anything shot outside celluloid, relying on digital editing technologies, or existing in the sphere of networked communications. It used these artefacts to fuel a series of discussions on emerging media forms. (J.J.King's report from Rotterdam 1999: When Will New Media Make Good On Its Various Promises!)

It was easy to be critical of such discussions - with the benefit of hindsight, events like Exploding did operate more as a social forum than places in which new ideas and movements were hammered out. But it was exactly through such meetings that new media put paid to many of the 'stupid questions' prompted by the emergence new information technologies. (There are a lot of them: Will new media end old media? Is the linear narrative an outdated form? Does 'non-linear' media give more power to the consumer? By now you must have found yourself stuck in at least one interminable discussion along these lines.)

What frustrated many in the community of programmers and technologists who'd produced the Net's 'productive technology' in the first place was the sustained lack of interest in code, the material condition of all networked media, as these talks continued. And indeed, it took many years of shooting the shit, plus a full-on market nosedive, to make the new media industry realise that its little (though much-vaunted) 'revolutions' were merely shifts in style, in presentation: pure spin. The radical change, that of the relations between media producers and consumers which underpinned all new media's activities, had already taken place.

Fast forward three years - Rotterdam Film Festival 2002. Suddenly, the questions that seemed at best esoteric and at worst irrelevant to those outside the new media industry have become absolutely mainstream. The Exploding programme has had its discussion sessions largely stripped and transferred to an entirely new category: 'What is Cinema?'. This programme seems intended to engage 'established' filmmakers, curators and critics in asking many of the same questions that Exploding has asked in previous years. 'It's so much bigger than they thought,' says Femke Wolting. 'They used to imagine these questions wouldn't affect them. Finally they've realised that they do. They have to take it on.'

In What Is Cinema's 'Digital Realities' discussion, therefore, we were treated to frequent revisitations of some very familiar material - minus many of the people who already know, from bitter experience, how to steer themselves through it. From the infuriatingly general ('will new media change filmmaking?') to the dully specific ('will digitality mean a return to neorealism?'), we seemed to have regressed right back to the beginning of new media's mythic 'revolution'. Our 'dreams' were once again 'coming true': non-linear editing processes could produce media closer to the 'Joycean stream of consciousness', closer to 'the way our minds work.'

And in all of this, Mike Figgis' 'Timecode' (which uses a screen split four ways) seemed to be held up as exemplary. According to Figgis, his split screen 'helped the viewer make their own interpretations of the film' (this, despite the fact that, as he openly admitted, 'the viewer's eye tends to go exactly where the soundtrack leads it'. In his so-called 'remixes' of Timecode, Figgis is merely altering the soundtrack. Draw your own conclusions as to how much interpretive latitude the split-screen technique therefore lends the viewer.)

Carping aside, what is disappointing is the way in which the same old questions are now being revisited without the benefit of hindsight. As Wolting says, these discussions are taking place out of context, and they ignore the central, most compelling issue that has arisen out of (the death of) the new media industry: that of distribution architectures and the economic imperative.

Many practitioners faced early on - and ultimately failed to solve - the problem of how to 'monetise' the 'content' that they were producing. Now, large media owners are themselves facing the same challenge . Distribution structures that finally realise the underlying architecture of the Internet - so-called 'peer to peer' or 'P2P' networks like Gnutella and Morpheus - are proving to have even greater 'productive potential' than the Web. P2P changes the fundamentals of media distribution. And initiatives such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which attempt to accord corporate media owners' some degree of control over their properties, cannot change that fact.

As Femke Wolting knows well, the feeling now in the new media industry is that it is these distribution architectures which will produce the next 'revolution in media'. It's not hard to calculate the material, economic changes that might bring that revolution about. In one very possible future produced by peer-to-peer, there are no 'media owners' (since media cannot be owned); it is not possible to generate revenue, at least not in the old way, from artistic creation: media abundance has reached such levels that the value of a single copy edges close to absolute zero.

What we're waiting to find out is what consequences such a context will have for creativity, innovation, and the production of new (as in novel) media. The danger of the old guard taking up the 'dreams' that 'new media' failed to realise - narratival innovations, the promise of 'non-linearity' and so forth - is that it will be found sleepwalking into a future in which media has undergone a truly radical change - one it has not thought about, and is not ready for.