HASTAC Conference Session 2: Interface Genealogies

HASTAC Conference Session 2: Interface Genealogies
4/20/2007, 10:15-11:30am

Caitlin Fisher, "Interface Epistemology: Hypermedia Work in the Academy"

Caitlin begins with her interest in interface for its capacity to make arguments intelligible.

She asks us to remember and thus re-evaluate hypertext--by way of a moving account of her own hypertext dissertation work from about 10 years ago--as an important feminist experimental practice. By reaching back to the recent but now seemingly ancient past of hypertext, she reminds us of feminist practices by women and people of color that get written out of dominant accounts of hypertext theory.

For her, hypertext extends from her analog cut and paste projects that tend to pile and spread across the floor. They combine ephemera, bits and pieces, artifacts from personal experience, and contributions from friends in an associative web of meaning. Hypertext seems to tend towards an autobiographical or self-portrait impulse, but one that is dynamic and collaborative.

But when her hypertext work was converted to HTML to make it more accessible, it became a hierarchized catalog. This reminds us that interface is not just a design issue but an epistemological issue. Interface is a way to craft knowledge in new ways. So we need interfaces with the capacity to communicate "thought sculptures," to re-center our concepts, to create new constellations of thought.

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Lisa Gitelman, "Xerographers of the Mind: The Lost Idea of the Photocopy"

Lisa defamiliarizes the banality of the photocopy by situating it as a text that conjures itself, a text that is a picture of itself. By exploring the history of the photocopy, she shows how the photocopy transformed from being conceived as a replacement for carbon paper to a scanning/storage/retrieval system.

A key historical moment in photocopying: the release of the Pentagon papers via photocopy in the late 1960s. When they were published, they were never discussed as photocopies, but transparent, self-identical texts. This is despite the fact that the person who did the copying, Daniel Ellsberg, was highly invested in the photocopies as photocopies. Photocopying was an editorial act (it involved cutting things out like the "Top Secret" stamped on each individual page), and an addictive, mimetic act that compels a "give it away and have your copy too" attitude.

Parting questions: What is the documentary subject? What is the xeroxable subject? What is a digital document? The meaning of the photocopy requires an account of both the person making the copy and the document itself.

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Matthew Tinkcom, "Eduction: A Theory of Value in the Digital Cinematic Epoch"

The digital destabilizes film as an archive and the archive of film. The path from production to consumption has been replaced with "prosumption" as the capacity to re/produce film has become more distributed. Digital media relies on "eduction": short-circuiting financial markets yet still extracting other forms of value.

The film Tarnation combines diverse media gathered over the lifetime of the director--his personal archive of home videos, movies, answering machine tapes, and other ephemera--into iMovie. It situates its queer author in terms of his relationship to his family. It is a queer son inventing a genealogy for himself. But this "amateur" queer autobiography is educed from many sources (home movies, television, Hollywood cinema, queer avant-garde cinema, pop music)--an archive that is now dispersed domestically, in the home. The personal, domestic archive is driven by nostalgia, historical curiosity, not monetary exchange. So Tarnation represents a digital incarnation of film, a different extraction of value that is temporal rather than monetary.

In Q&A, Matthew points out that DVDs with extras and extended director's cuts create the problem of "what the film is." And are these extras a gift or a burden? As the theatrical release becomes a "beta test" for the improved dvd version, fan participation in discovering continuity errors or contributing to narrative is expected but not renumerated. So film spectators are called to do unpaid labor.