Will Burdette's blog

One More Thing: Errol Morris's Believing Is Seeing

Will Burdette — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 04:59:45 +0000

I had no idea virtual book tours existed until someone contacted me to review Errol Morris's new book Believing Is Seeing in viz. Or, rather, as soon as someone contacted me to review Errol Morris's book, I was like "Of course they have virtual book tours. They have virtual everything." I just didn't realize "virtual book tour" was the Google phrase. A virtual book tour schedules reviews on blogs over time (in this case, about a month) to generate sustained buzz. You are here, at stop five on this tour. Welcome to this very special event. I start here to emphasize what we all already know (but what a colleague just reminded me of): temporality is different online. An idea moving across the country in a van is a tour. An idea moving across the internet is a meme. They are different things.

Errol Morris clearly travels a lot. But Errol Morris the person and Errol Morris the books, films, and internettings travel in different temporal soups. Morris the person travels around and interviews a lot of other people. In fact, he built a machine so he could capture on screen the kind of eye contact that happens in a face-to-face encounter. F2F encounters are not the same thing as media that circulate. They are not unconnected, but they are not the same. They travel at different speeds. And that may be the point of Believing is Seeing.

One of the people Morris interviewed was Spc. Sabrina Harman, a woman in many photographs that came out of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. We've all seen the pictures. We've read about the scandal. Morris interviewed Harman for his film Standard Operating Procedure. I haven't seen the film because I'm a grad student, and I have limited time for movies. The story is told on Morris's blog. But blogs, too, have their own temporal qualities. Perhaps I skimmed the blog entry or passed by it completely. But then, again, the story is told in Believing Is Seeing, which found its way to me via the aforementioned virtual book tour. And so I find myself confronting, again, the smiling visage of Harman with a dead body. The body was dead long before Harman posed, all smiling and thumbs up, with it. We know this because Morris lays out the sequence of events thanks to the hidden EXIF files that come standard in images taken with digital cameras. Morris reminds us that camera make and model, clock, aperture, exposure time, etc., are all embedded in these files. We have extra data, besides the surface of the Abu Ghraib images, to analyze. All of this is reminiscent of William Gibson's novel Pattern Recognition, but it is not fiction. We know the image is not fiction because the book is not a work of fiction. It is not marketed and distributed as such. It moves through the publishing systems as a set of "observations on the mysteries of photography."

Is it a good book? This is supposed to be a review, so I should at least hint at whether I think the book is good or not. But I won't. My evaluation of Morris's writing seems less important than what the book does. The idea that wrapping stories in a book-like package lends them credibility has been thoroughly interrogated by this point in the history of the book. So I won't suggest that what the book does is lend gravitas to the story. Nor will I suggest that books allow time for thoughtful reflection compared to movies and blogs and news stories. We can linger over whatever media we like. What the book does depends on who picks it up, how they read it, and what they take away from it.

I am reading the book so that I can write a review of it. I agreed to do so in exchange for a free copy. I agreed to do so because I am a fan of Morris's other work. So what a book does is contingent on many things. What the book did for me was this: it brought to my attention one more thing, an addition, a bit of supplemental information. This one more thing came in one of the many interviews transcribed in the book. The interview is between Morris and Paul Ekman, an expert on facial expressions. Ekman has written many books like Emotions Revealed, Unmasking the Face, and Telling Lies. Ekman is also behind the show Lie to Me. In the interview, Ekman talks about what different kind of smiles suggest about emotions. For example, there's a difference between the say-cheese smile and a smile of authentic pleasure. Ekman says, "I'll add one more thing. When we see someone smile, it is almost irresistible that we smile back at them" (116). And it's this one more thing that, Morris argues, upsets us:

it is not an upsetting photograph just because we see someone smiling in the context of the horrible, but because when we look at her, we have to resist smiling ourselves. We see her smile and and start smiling ourselves. But when we see the dead man, we recoil in horror. Our 'almost irresistible' need to smile makes us feel complicit in the man's death. And it makes us angry. We 'transfer' those feelings to Sabrina. (116)

This complicity is complicated by the fact that many of the detainees are--by standard operating procedure--unrecorded, ghosts (a.k.a. OGAs, which is shorthand for the "Other Government Agencies" that deposited them at Abu Ghraib). Harman and her cohort were not just posing for photos, they were taking pictures of ghosts, recording things that our government had agreed not to record. And now Morris has recorded it again, this time in book form. And the book keeps the images moving through different distribution systems at different speeds. And this means the images will reach new audiences, or they will reach old audiences again. And some of us might realize we're all complicit in it. And it should make us angry.

The Synchronicity of Cinema, Phonography, and Writing

Will Burdette — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 21:09:10 +0000

The Edison-Bell picturegram from 1927 (in Sound Recordings). The toy illustrates the convergence of sound and image.

As the budding audio recording industry was creating use value by advertising the phonograph alongside writing machines, pens, pencils, and cameras, another convergence was happening as well. The motion picture industry, which developed concurrently with the audio recording industry, sought to synch up the sights and sounds of the body. Talking, singing, dancing, fighting, and falling had been standard in the motion picture industry since it began, but these bodily acts happened silently on screen. It was only a matter of time before the body would be audible on screen.

A Visual History of Audio Recording, Part Two from Will Burdette on Vimeo.

The audio-video convergence finally happened in 1927 with "The Jazz Singer," but Thomas Edison had worked on motion picture prototypes (the Kinetoscope and the Kinetograph) forty years prior. And, the convergence was far from complete, total, or perfect. The same year "The Jazz Singer" was released, Edison released another clumsy attempt at combining sound and pictures. According to Peter Copeland in the book Sound Recordings, The Edison-Bell picturegram was "easy to damage and was not a huge success."

The merging of audio recording and moving images represents both a period of convergence and a period of divergence. While phonography, writing, and cinema came together in the production of movies, they also fractured into distinct industries and skill sets. The kinetoscope and the phonograph came out of Edison's Menlo Park lab, but after their invention, motion pictures and audio recording (as well as writing) would increasingly professionalize, specialize, and fracture. In an article version of "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter," Friedrich Kittler writes:

The historical synchronicity of cinema, phonography, and typewriter separated the data flows of optics, acoustics, and writing and rendered them autonomous. The fact of this differentiation is not altered by the recent ability of electric or electronic media to bring them back together and combine them. (113-4)

Even though computer users can now remix audio and video on their laptops—and even though audio recording and movies grew out the same place—optics, acoustics, and writing remain distinct.

It is important to see this prolonged synching of audio and video as both a convergence and a divergence. The convergence speaks to our desire to combine technologies to create environments in which we can access all of our senses and immerse ourselves. But the divergence suggests that optical, acoustic, and written modalities have developed into different industries for good reasons. Different parts of our bodies and brains are activated by different modalities. Different training and skill sets are required for producing visual, aural, and written texts. Different professions have different levels of access to knowledge and skills associated with each modality. And, of course, in terms of universal design, we all have different levels of access to the texts produced with these different modalities. And our levels of access are not fixed. We gain and lose abilities through things like employment, education, and age. As we keep in mind the fact that audio recording has a connection to writing, and to the realm of the visual, we might also consider the value that comes from separating modalities.

Works Cited

Copeland, Peter. Sound Recordings. London: British Library, 1991. Print.

Kittler, Friedrich. "Gramophone, Film, Typewriter." October 41 (Summer 1987): 101-118. Google. Web. 25 July 2011. .

This is the third in a series of blog posts that will explore visual aspects of audio recording technologies. If you enjoyed it, you might read the first post, and second post, too.

Creating Use Value Through Phonograph Ads

Will Burdette — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:50:19 +0000

Illustration of Edison's original phonograph from Scientific American in 1877.

Between the visual origins of the phonograph and a robust consumer market centered on record labels, there was a period of time during which the invention had to establish its own utility. According to Brian Massumi in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, utility always comes after the act of invention:

The link between uselessness and invention even applies to instrumental reason: a true invention is an object that precedes its utility. An invention is something for which a use must be created. Once the utility is produced, it rapidly self-converts into a need. This is the direction of flow of the history of technology (of which bodies, things, and objects are the first artifacts): backward. (96)

Certainly, folks like Edison helped to create the utility for the phonograph. In "The Phonograph and its Future" in the May 1878 issue of The North American Review, Edison makes the following suggestions for future uses of phonography: letters, dictations, audiobooks, education, music, family records, music boxes, toys, clocks, advertising, speeches, and answering machines. But the use value of the phonograph is created as much by advertisements as articles. By looking at the advertisements from Scientific American around the turn of the century, we can get a glimpse of how the use value of the phonograph was invented in the context of both precision instruments and writing machines. The ads, which are printed two decades after Edison introduced the phonograph to the editors at Scientific American and posited its future in The North American Review, give a visual context for the phonograph.

A Visual History of Audio Recording, Part One (v2) from Will Burdette on Vimeo. This video shows advertisements from Scientific American from 1901-1903. The music in the video is "12th Street Rag" by Imperial Marimba Band. (http://goo.gl/gyKq3). For further reading that supports the unsubstantiated claims made in this video, see reading list below.

So what do we learn by looking at the visual context of phonograph marketing? Well, we can kind of see how imaginations were shaped by the instruments at hand. In the video, the phonograph is advertised alongside precision instruments like the lathe. From biographical information we know that in the 1860s one of Edison's few possessions was a lathe. In Edison, His Life and Inventions, Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin refer to Edison's "Arduous Years in The Central West." They write, "He rented a room in the top floor of an office building, bought a cot, and an oil stove, a foot-lathe, and some tools" (92). Later, they describe the phonograph's reproducing device "like the cutting-tool of a lathe" (219).The biography was written in 1910, just years after the side-by-side lathe and phonograph ads. Even as late as the 1950s, the cutting instruments for master phonograph recordings were called lathes. Although their use values were completely different, the early phonograph and the lathe were inextricable.

In order to imagine the phonograph's possibilities, someone first had to reimagine the possibilities of a lathe. As the ads suggest, the lathe was part of the ecosystem from which the phonograph emerged. Still, a lathe that made a trace of a sound might have seemed trivial compared with something that already had a use, like the lathed leg of a table. In fact, Edison cashed in on the triviality of the phonograph in the days before these ads; he leased the machines to exhibitors who charged admission to listen to them. Edison also took a cut of the ticket sales. But that triviality was only one way of perceiving (and marketing) the phonograph. As Massumi writes, “An invention is a sensible concept that precedes and produces its own possibility (its system of connection-cases, its combinatoric)” (96). As the ads illustrate, the system of connection-cases that cluster around the phonograph include both the lathe and writing instruments of all kinds.

Lest consumers be confused, Edison was right there all along to situate the lathe-influenced phonograph among writing instruments like the pencil, the pen, and the camera. Edison writes that "The main utility of the phonograph, however, being for the purpose of letter-writing and other forms of dictation, the design is made with a view to its utility for that purpose" (531). Of course he also outlined a number of other uses, from the trivial to the funereal. On the trivial end of the continuum, he suggests "A doll which may speak, sing, cry or laugh." On the funereal end of the continuum, he writes, "For the purpose of preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of a dying member of the family—as of great men—the phonograph will unquestionably outrank the photograph" (533-4).

Returning to the ads from the turn of the century, we can see this continuum of use value that runs from play to serious work. Those values are built into the tools and the marketing of tools. The phonograph is just a lathe for amusement.

Of course I shouldn't have to point out similarities to our current multimedia ecosystems, but, at the risk of being too heavy handed, I will. The biggest difference between the multimedia convergence illustrated in the pages of Scientific American in the early 1900s and today's convergence culture is the soundtrack. Now, the ads focus on tools. In our current moment, we might be similarly obsessed with multimedia tools like iPads, iphones, android tablets, and laptops. But convergence is not really about hardware. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins writes, "We are entering an era of prolonged transition and transformation in the way media operates. Convergence describes the process by which we will sort through those options. There will be no magical black box that puts everything in order again" (24). By no black box, Jenkins seems to suggest that we should not fixate on the tools. There never will be a magical black box. Sure, we now have computers and smartphones that allow for audio recording, writing, images, video, and amusements all in one device. But who among us uses just one device? (There is a whole, very loaded, very problematc digital divide argument in that last question, but that's for another post.) The cloud computing movement (access to your information from any device) on the immediate horizon is further evidence of the no-black-box theory of convergence. But there is a fact (of which Jenkins is, I'm sure, well aware) obscured by this quote and made visible by the ads: We have been entering this prolonged transition period for more than 100 years. We have been living in convergence culture for generations. "Convergence" does not signify the just the evolution of tools like multimedia Swiss army knives and digital Leathermen multitools. The evolution of tools is merely a tangible manifestation of an evolution of behaviors. These behaviors used to fall under distinct categories labeled "work" and "amusement." It is those categories that have been converging for more than a century.

Works Cited:

Dyer, Frank Lewis, Thomas Commerford Martin. Edison, His Life and Inventions. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1910. Google Books.

Edison, Thomas. "The Phonograph and Its Future." The North American Review. 126.262 (1878): 527-536. JSTOR. Web. 19 Jan. 2011. .

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual : Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002.

For further reading:

Baron, Dennis. “From Pencils to Pixels: The Stages of Literacy Technologies.” Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Ed. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan, UT: Utah State UP, 1999. 15-33.

Gitelman, Lisa. Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.

Syverson, M. A. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Southern Illinois University Press: Carbondale, 1999.

This is the second in a series of blog posts that will explore visual aspects of audio recording technologies. If you enjoyed it, you might read the first post, too.

The Visual Origins of Audio Recording

Will Burdette — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 22:17:07 +0000

Grooves from the original phonograph recording, reproduced in Scientific American in 1877.

Most of us do not process audio recordings in a vacuum. There is a visual dimension to our aural world. Although, sadly, liner notes are impoverished in the digital realm (although not absolutely or irrevocably so), we still have a world of visual information when navigating sound in digital spaces. Whether digital or analog, sights and sounds coevolve. This may sound overly simplistic, but just under the surface, things get complex. When you drill down into the relationship between audio recording and its associated visual media, a complex ecosystem of delivery technologies, mechanical inventions, distribution channels, and marketing efforts emerges. We might begin to explore this complexity by looking at some artifacts. Fortunately, the recording industry is an artifact-generating machine.

The visual aspects of audio recordings are most obviously attached to the delivery technologies, which exist in a lifecycle of planned obsolescence. The jewel case, the cassette box, the record sleeve— they are all dead. (Long live album covers and liner notes!) But the medium of audio recording evolves (or devolves) after these delivery technologies are obsolete. In Convergence Culture, Henry Jenkins explains the distinction between delivery technologies and a medium. Jenkins notes that Bruce Sterling established a "Dead Media Project" that included, among other items, the Edison wax cylinder. Ironically, the Dead Media Project is now "dead." But, as Jenkins writes, examining dead delivery technologies urges us toward an evolutionary understanding of media:

[H]istory teaches us that old media never die—and they don't even necessarily fade away. What dies are simply the tools we use to access media content—the 8-track, the Beta tape. These are what media scholars call delivery technologies. Most of what Sterling's project lists falls under this category. Delivery technologies become obsolete and get replaced; media, on the other hand, evolve. Recorded sound is the medium. CDs, MP3 files and 8-track cassettes are delivery technologies (13).

Once we make the distinction between medium (recorded sound) and delivery technology (records, for example), we open up the world of recorded sound to all sorts of artifacts in addition to the actual disc, tape, or digital file. The visual aspects of delivery technologies—record labels—are the most obvious marriage of sight and sound, and they deserve some attention. However, the entire delivery apparatus— from the labels, to the various housings and cover art, to ads and posters promoting the sale of the delivery technology, to the shelf spaces and layouts of record stores—had to evolve along with the medium. It's interesting to think of the visual aspects of audio recording that came before the packaging.

In the beginning, there was a much more modest delivery apparatus: simple grooves in tin foil. And, before Edison thought of etching a playable artifact, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville created a machine that was designed to create visual representations of sound:

In fact, it was the visually oriented phonautograph machine that led Edison to create his phonograph. In Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Friedrich Kittler writes, "A Willis-type machine gave him the idea for the phonograph; a Scott-type machine pushed him toward its realization" (27). (The Robert Willis part of the equation consisted of a vibrating mechanism.) A marketing machine would push Edison's invention into the home of every American, creating some visually rich artifacts along the way. But that's another post.

This is the first in a series of posts that examine the visual context of audio recording.

Works Cited

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.