MiT6 - Media Temporalities (slidecast)

I'm delighted to present slidecasts of the four talks that comprised the "Media Temporalities" panel at Media in Transition 6, held Saturday 25 April 5-6:30 at MIT. I hope that, now that we're a few months past the sometimes overwhelming MiT6 excitement, this virtual reconstruction will hold some interest for those who weren't able to attend the session. Click the play buttons to hear an audio recording of each talk synchronized with the slides.

- Julie Levin Russo (moderator)

Media Temporalities: Genre, Queer Space, and Digital Archives in Transition

While the term "cyberspace" has swiftly entered daily conversation, the notion of "cybertime" receives considerably less scrutiny. Perhaps this is because the Internet seems to both infinitely expand, growing richer by the minute with the addition of new content, and remain stable, preserved in a nebulous cloud between networked computers. Yet as media, online or otherwise, develop and grow so too do cultural understandings of temporal concepts like permanence, stability, the span of a generation, and (post)modernity. This panel thus seeks to analyze a few case studies in media temporality and the way that changes in media are marked by paradigms of time. By analyzing American time capsules, Sarah Toton discusses the changing roles of technology in cultural preservation, curation and audience participation. Examining practices of self-inscription within digital archives, Anne Kustitz considers Foucault's arts of existence as a model for users' negotiation of online information’s ephemerality and permanency. Melanie Kohnen scrutinizes the consequence of distancing viewers from queer filmic time. In investigating the transmediation of noir themes, Louisa Stein reflects on the nature of genre continuities throughout media eras, speculating on the influence of digitally-savvy "millenials" on a changing media genre. Through these examinations of archives, films, and other online materials, this panel considers the importance of addressing shifting temporalities and situating users and audiences within them.

Melanie E.S. Kohnen

As a medium of representation, the apparatus of cinema necessarily distances the depiction of space and time from the perceived reality of the spectator. Nevertheless, films have been credited with bringing audiences closer to social realities with which they might be unfamiliar. Recently, mainstream press and audiences have bestowed this credit on the films Boys Don't Cry (1999) and Brokeback Mountain (2005), designating them as breakthroughs in Hollywood's approach to representing queer desires and identities. I challenge this assessment and argue that increasing efforts of putting queerness on film and television screens always include a screening of queerness that limits or filters out unruly and undermining aspects. In particular, my paper analyzes how genre and mise-en-scene facilitate a screening of queerness in Boys Don't Cry and Brokeback Mountain that encapsulates the films' diegeses in a distant place and time. Instead of bringing queerness closer to the spectator, these screening processes render the representations of queer desires and identities non-threatening to both the norms of Hollywood cinema and of American society. In fact, I want to underline that the praise for the breakthrough qualities of these films precisely depends on their encapsulation of queerness in a time and place that is alien and remote, and, as such, ultimately unable to significantly impact neither Hollywood film-making nor everyday life.

Anne Kustritz

The enormous expansion of digital archiving and unprecedented levels of access to information produce both incredible excitement and anxiety. For individuals, massive digital archives of personal information inspire concerns about privacy, identity theft, and the potential for government interference in citizens' private lives. Each of these anxieties construct the internet's digital archives as sites of multi-faceted, panoptic surveillance, very much in the tradition established by Michel Foucault's early work. Yet, despite constant reminders of the always present potential for surveillance and discipline, people continue to blog, chat, interact, podcast, and otherwise inscribe themselves into the digital archive. These practices of deliberate digital self-fashioning can be understood as arts of existence or arts of the self, an aesthetic theory of identity and ethics developed in Foucault's later works. Attempts to manage and cultivate the representation of the self housed within digital archives as an aesthetic project offer a glimpse of individuals functioning within surveillance with a critical self-reflexivity about the constructedness of identity and the pervasive reach of power.

Louisa Stein

This talk investigates the continuities and transformations of generic discourse across media formats and over time. Contemporary genre theorists such as Rick Altman and Jason Mittell consider genres as complex circuits of meaning that bridge media formats and history/time. I focus here on film noir, a generic concept that seems especially bound up with questions of technology and with notions of temporality and nostalgia. Specifically, I look at new manifestations of film noir in television, new media extensions, and independent digital arenas. I consider the way in which these texts combine contemporary investments in nostalgia and pastness with questions of the moral (or immoral) import of technology. Currently, noir elements are especially central in television programs designed to reach the desirable young adult audience, a generation known in industrial terms as Millennials. A noir ethos characterizes much contemporary TV programming, including shows such as Gossip Girl, Heroes, Kyle XY, Lost, Supernatural, and The Wire. Such television programs frequently combine questions of contemporary moral ambiguity with nostalgic visuals, and invoke the threat of corporate technology draped in the mystique of noir. I trace these noir-inflected representations of technology from TV texts to their digital media extensions and to the noir-infused responses of viewers turned transmedia participants.

Sarah Toton

While historic examples of time capsules date back to Mesopotamia, the modern act of burying a sealed object containing products of material culture began in Atlanta, GA in 1936 when the Crypt of Civilization was sealed at Oglethorpe University. The Crypt became the first of a handful of "millennial time capsules": that is, capsules sealed for over 1000 years. Since the 1930s, time capsules have become a popular attempt to preserve a society through its technologies and products. This paper uncovers two time capsules--the Crypt of Civilization and Westinghouse's Capsule of Cupaloy--and suggests the ideological and commercial impulses behind these popular endeavors in collection and archiving.