Author Archives: Bob Rehak

Category confusion

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Picture it: three men on a plane, ranged unluckily in the same row of seats: a chance adjacency we each interpreted as punishment by the fates. To my right in the window seat, a college student slouching in sweatpants, about the same size as me (6 foot three, two hundred and twenty-ish pounds) but with a dense muscularity, a neutron-star version of my slack and dissipated forty-five-year-old self. To my left, a rotund gentleman my age or a little older. As I maneuvered past him to take my place in the middle seat, he said with a combination of apology and accomplishment, “I lost 100 pounds, now I’m working on the next 100.”

I rarely find myself in the goldilocks zone, but there I was, sandwiched between a smaller and a larger version of myself. All of us wedging shoulders uncomfortably for the two-hour flight from Atlanta to Detroit.

But more interesting than the cramps I courteously self-inflicted holding myself in a polite pretzel, a pacifying topographic adaptation to the shape envelopes of my flanking neighbors, was the way for the first time I was tricked by new media. An iPad picked the pocket of my imaginary.

To the left, big neighbor read his big novel, a heavy brick of paper. To the right, college student played his PSP. I in the middle read The Passage, by Justin Cronin, on my iPad. A bell gonged, the pilot said we were on approach to DTW, the flight attendant told us to turn off our electronic devices. The PSP got put away, The print novel didn’t. And my iPad? It stayed open throughout the landing; it wasn’t until we touched down that I realized, with a guilty start, that I had forgotten it was an electronic device at all.

Ebooks and ereading are not natural to me: they have felt unpleasantly frictionless and inherently duplicitous in their mimicry of an ontologically distinct media experience. But today something changed; the contents of my mind shifted during travel, and I accepted the iPad into that group of personal technologies I pay the high compliment of naturalizing by forgetting they are technologies in the first place.

Going mobile

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A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with the incomparable Henry Jenkins about the difficulty of knowing what media to bring when traveling, especially when one is cut off from the cloud. In my case, the cloud is local to my home — the wireless ecosystem that knits together the media content stored on several terabytes of external hard drives and my iPad, which is also, thanks to the Air Video app and an HDMI dongle, my flatscreen, high-def TV. For the next few days, while I’m in Michigan, I will be forced to function more or less nomadically, which means preloading content.

So here’s what I’m bringing with me: grading. Course prep for next week — two movies: Color Adjustment and Catfish, the former on DVD, the latter a digital file — and a PDF excerpt of Ken Hillis’s Online A Lot of the Time. The first season of Bob’s Burgers, also digital. The movie Valhalla Rising and two episodes of the BBC’s Sherlock. Two print books: Ina Rae Hark’s recent short monograph on Star Trek, and Matt Hills’s Triumph of a Time Lord, on Doctor Who.

Will I get through it all? Certainly not, especially given the family business I am on, which is likely to occupy most of my time. But in my traveling bubble of media, what Raymond Williams would call my mobile privatization, I want to preserve at least a trace of the freedom of choice my home hotspot would otherwise provide.

Precisely

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Excited to dig into The Values of Precision, edited by M. Norton Wise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Most of this collection from the history and philosophy of science delves into the development of precision measuring instruments in science and manufacturing from the late eighteenth century to the present, and I will admit that much of it has little to do with my current research interest in fantastic-media objects and 3D printing. But what does resonate is Wise’s observation, in his Introduction, that precision and accuracy are critical pieces of standardization, or in Wise’s words, “establishing uniformity by agreement” (9).

Problems of establishing precision thereby become simultaneously questions of establishing agreement among a community. Precision requires standardization. (8)

I’ve been thinking about standardization in relation not just to the fantastic-media object’s shape (its resemblance to an ideal, a fictional entity given visual form in film, television, comics, or gaming) but its scale, a quality that becomes important when we think of these objects are part of a set, array, or collection. Particularly important to fantasy wargaming, the scale of the fantastic-media object dictates the mise-en-scene of battle, those tabletop spaces on which metal and plastic armies arrange themselves in tactical orientation to one another. The history of organized wargaming is in large part a history of the standardization of scales for fighting figurines, and these shared scalar qualities are even more important for fantasy wargaming, the dimensions of whose objects (dragons, cyborgs, superheroes, and so on) can be stabilized only through the establishment of conventions and product lines to feed them.

Monday

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Nearing the end of today’s work bubble: a precious afternoon spent in the warm womb of my office, getting stuff done. Since becoming a father some seven months ago, work has inverted its affective sign: formerly the thing I dreaded doing, I now rush to it, motivated both by the promise of uninterrupted hours and by the knowledge that, when I’ve finished for the day, I can go home to Zach and just be with him. Parenthood has forced compartmentalization on me, and I like the new boundaries in my life.

What I’ve done today: a smattering of course prep. This week in TV & New Media the topic is “Spaces and Screens,” and we’re reading a chapter from Newman and Levine’s Legitimizing Television; Daniel Chamberlin’s “Media Interfaces, Networked Media Spaces, and the Mass Customization of Everyday Life” from the FlowTV collection; and William Boddy’s “Is It TV Yet? The Dislocated Screens of Television in a Mobile Digital Culture,” from Bennett and Strange’s Television as Digital Media. A solid collection of essays that surprised me with their focus on the industrial side of things rather than the user/viewer’s experience of small screens; together the pieces paint a picture of media corporations in unpleasant throes of transformation, writhing in survival agonies like mammoths stuck in La Brea tar.

Although we haven’t spend a lot of time looking at advertising, based on prior conversations with the students, I suspect I know which way their reactions will go — they’ll be horrified at the predatory practices outlined in Boddy’s essay especially, which charts a range of obnoxious strategies for putting ads — the more customized and first-personal the better — in front of people at grocery stores, bus depots, medical waiting rooms, and gas stations. This morning I was assaulted by a gas station monitor blaring Chase Freedom commercials at me as I stood in the chill wind. Pinned between the car and the gas pump, I felt like an idling, pinging machine myself, a tank getting topped off with messages I didn’t ask for.

Copyright on the Fabrication Frontier

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This post from the New York Times Bits blog is one of the first I’ve seen to address the problems — and opportunities — likely to be created by personal-fabrication technology, aka 3D printing, when it encounters copyright law designed for an earlier era. As Nick Bilton points out, having a box on your desktop that manufactures solid objects from data files opens the door to the physical reproduction not just of objects you have designed yourself, but objects that already exist:

Not only will it change the nature of manufacturing, but it will further challenge our concept of ownership and copyright. Suppose you covet a lovely new mug at a friend’s house. So you snap a few pictures of it. Software renders those photos into designs that you use to print copies of the mug on your home 3-D printer. Did you break the law by doing this? You might think so, but surprisingly, you didn’t.

Bilton goes on to explain that while copyright law protects one kind of object — the aesthetic — from being replicated without permission of the owner, another class of item — the utilitarian — is fair game. “If an object is purely aesthetic it will be protected by copyright, but if the object does something, it is not the kind of thing that can be protected,” Bilton quotes attorney Michael Weinberg as saying. The logic goes something like this: if you could conceivably have made your own version of the mug in, say, a pottery class, it wouldn’t be illegal; so employing a hardware intermediary to accomplish the same goal is similarly allowed.

The apparently tidy distinction between the artful and the useful suggests that there is more at stake here than simply case law and precedent, the glacial patching of traditional legislation to apply to nontraditional processes and products. (Lawrence Lessig’s remix culture might here be understood as replication culture.) In addition to foregrounding the question of how we name and assign value to the things around us, personal fabrication foregrounds new kinds of objects that fall somewhere between the pretty and the practical, neither toy nor tool but something in between, with branded identities and iconographic affordances that make them the powerful focus of manufacturing and collecting, as well as performative and procedural, activity both at the subcultural and “supercultural” level.

I’ve been interested in 3D printing since 2007, when I came across Neil Gershenfeld’s book Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop. (Gershenfeld is the director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and perhaps the key proselytizer of what the Times has labeled the Industrial Revolution 2.0.) For me, as a theorist and fan of popular culture and fantastic media franchises in particular, the profound shakeup promised by 3D printing is less about designing new kinds of widgets or copying existing ones than about the way that fantasy-media objects and the practices around them will be reshaped. Spaceship models, superhero collectible busts, even fantasy-wargaming miniatures — the colorful statuary on display in any comic-book store, materialized forms of what otherwise exists only on paper — will inevitably find their place within the personal-fabrication movement. Most of these objects are licensed, of course, and provided by artists under contract with companies like Sideshow Collectibles and McFarlane Toys. But to adapt the question that Bilton poses, what will happen when I can snap several photos of a friend’s Green Lantern maquette or Warhammer 40K mini, stitch them together on my iPhone (you can bet there’ll be an app for that), send the resulting shape file to my 3D printer, and produce my own instance?

Surely then the intellectual-property hammer will come down — under current codes, there’s no way to justify a Captain Kirk figurine or the Doctor’s Sonic Screwdriver as a practical rather than an aesthetic object — and we’ll witness not the elimination of unlicensed fantasy-media objects, but their migration to the anarchic wilds of piracy, newsgroups, and torrents, just as current “flat” media content like television, movies, and ebooks circulate free for the taking. To date I’ve found little discussion of the role of such objects and their probable audiences, i.e. tech-savvy scofflaws, in the 3D printing literature, which focuses instead on the rapid-prototyping function of these emerging technologies: testing out new inventions or generating workaday things like flashlights and doorknobs. But it’s precisely this dividing line, between the things we use and the things we enjoy because they connect us to vast transmedia entertainment systems, that will dictate 3D printing’s future as the commercial and cultural juggernaut I suspect it will be.

In Media Res: Special Effects

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Somewhere around the introduction of Google+, I developed an allergy to self-promotion, and withdrew my parasocial feelers from Facebook as well as the nascent G+. I mean to cast no aspersions on the active users of those sites; my going dark, or at least dimmed, on the social-networking front stems not from disapproval but from simple overload. I’m returning to teaching from a year of sabbatical, and I’m a new father to boot, making for happy but exhausting times. I could be better about taking the raw material of my life (and the slightly more refined material of my professional activities) and plugging it into a live data feed, but my curmudgeonly suspicion that the public affordances of new media, so often presented to us as opportunities for self-expression and collective knowledge-building, are simply labor under the sexy sign of the digital — the conscripted misrecognized as the voluntary — stays my hand.

All that said, though, I do have news: this week I am co-organizing a set of pieces on special effects at In Media Res, the MediaCommons project devoted to showcasing short audiovisual “exhibits” accompanied by learned commentary. This week’s posts, by Kimberly Ramirez, Drew Ayers, Chuck Tryon, and Dan North, come out of a larger project, an anthology entitled Special Effects: New Histories, Theories, Contexts, co-edited by me, Dan North, and Michael S. Duffy.

You can read more about that project and the week’s curations in our introductory essay, located here.

 

What All the Foss Is About

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Here’s a smart writeup on a new book collecting the artwork of Chris Foss, the distinctive and influential British artist whose paintings have graced the cover of many a science-fiction novel while circulating independently as quanta of outré visualization on their own. Growing up in the 1970s, I was aware of Foss more through the latter channel: glimpses of futurism in the pages of magazines like Omni and Starlog, often accompanying features on computer games (whose simple 8-bit graphics expanded logarithmically in my imagination thanks to their association with Foss’s billowing, rainbowed vistas and sensuously rounded mechanisma) or SF films then in production: Foss was one of the many artists conscripted to visualize Ridley Scott’s 1979 landmark Alien.

Among the same cohort was Ron Cobb, who, like Foss and the great but neglected John Harris, had a knack for visualizing structures of indeterminate purpose and scale, suspended against the clouds of alien worlds, the neon gasfields of nebulae, the onyx depths of outer space. Simultaneously conveying gigantic mass — humans merely implied as unobservable specks — and toylike containment within the filmed frame or printed page, the future machines envisioned by Foss and his peers were both fanciful and functional. Or as Simon Gallagher elegantly puts it:

Foss’s work is defined by that jarring oxymoron: his iconic spaceships are almost biological, and certainly monstrous, and yet, unlike anything that came before them, they are intricate in their mechanical realism. They are the convergence of fantasy and precision, and there is a fundamental contradiction within the designs that suggests both a hopeful futurism and an ominous sense of dread in the sheer size and scale of the machine monsters he creates.

The new Foss book joins a growing section of my shelf devoted to SF illustration as a form of production technology, assisting the transmedial flow of content, bridging the gaps between screenplays and feature films, design docs and finished video games, word and image and object.

Notes on Spacewar

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What is it about Spacewar that so completely captures my imagination? Teaching my Theory and History of Video Games class, I once again crack open Steven Levy’s great book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which I have read at least a dozen times since it was published in 1984. A time now further away than the period of which Levy was then writing — the late 1950s and early 60s, when a motley assortment of brilliantly talented social misfits at MIT repurposed a PDP-1 to create, if not the world’s first computer game, then the first digital artifact to capture the spirit and culture of gaming that would explode over subsequent decades. Below, a bulletin board of sorts, collecting resources on this seminal software object and the matrix from which it was spawned.

Steve “Slug” Russell, posing with a PDP-1.

A bibliography on hacker/computer culture.

An article on Spacewar from WebBox’s CGI Timeline.

From the MIT Museum.

Origin story from Creative Computing magazine, August 1981. I remember reading this when it first came out, at the age of sixteen!

News snippet from Decuscope, April 1962. I was not alive to read this one at the time of its publication. Decuscope, one finds, is a newsletter for DEC (Digital Equipment Computer) Users; PDFs from 1961-1972 here.

About that PDP-1 and its capabilities. It’s always vertigo-inducing to consider how computing power and resources have changed. The TX-0 on which MIT’s hackers cut their teeth had something like 4K of storage, while its successor, the PDP-1, had the equivalent of 9K. By contrast, the Google Doodle below, at 48K, is more than five times as large:

Some tools for finding one’s bearings amid the rushing rapids of Moore’s Law: Wikipedia pages for the TX-0 and PDP-1; a byte metrics table; a more general-purpose data unit converter.

Ron Cobb: Initial Thoughts

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A spontaneous enthusiasm, eruption of unvoiced nerd-love that has been simmering in my soul since I was twelve or thirteen, prompts this quick reflection on Ron Cobb. As an artist, Cobb contributed plentifully to how I understood and visualized the science fiction with which I grew up; as a concept artist specifically his drawings and paintings played a generative role in films like Star Wars (1977) and Alien (1979) — movies we now recognize as classics in part because of their rich, world-creating visual design.

To judge from the catalog of his work featured in Colorvision (1981), Cobb’s influence on the production of these films appears to have been both piecemeal and foundational: a handful of his bizarre creatures populate the Mos Eisley cantina, and his designs for Alien were limited to the interior and exterior of the Nostromo, with H. R. Giger’s biomechanics providing the movie’s black and glistening core. But in another way, Cobb’s work reflects an animating spirit of cinematic science fiction in the 1970s, which increasingly in the wake of Star Trek (1966-1969) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) demanded an engineer’s and architect’s eye to lend their futuristic worlds the fascination of function.

I’ve been studying concept artists like Cobb — Brian Froud is a cognate, as are Syd Mead and in a previous age Chesley Bonestell — as part of a broader research project on illustration. I hope to have more to say about this shortly, but for now I will simply note the archeological pleasure of paging through Cobb’s designs (like the one above, “Tug,” an early version of Alien‘s Nostromo) to find, not the final object as recorded on film, but — like the panda’s thumb — an evolutionary step toward it. The special property of cinematic concept art is not just that it exists prior to the film we later come to know, but that it serves as a “draft,” freezing for our later study a dialogue among director, crew, consultants as they move toward consensus. Cobb’s visualization does not just visualize an artifact of production; it is such an artifact, and as such it offers us, alongside the creation of a beloved film, the genesis of our own imaginary.

More on Cobb and the Nostromo here.