Making sense: the transformation of documentary by digital and networked media

Abstract

The article takes up Jean-Luc Nancy's account of the recent history of relations between sense, meaning and technics, along with François Zourabichvili's understanding of sense as an immanent logic of forces. It suggests that there is indeed a new sense of sense in three recent documentaries for which digital and/or networked media technics were crucial. These are Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2012), Leanne Allison and Jeremy Mendes' Bear 71 (2012) and James George and Jonathan Minard's Clouds (2014). The article also suggests that these ‘new’ documentaries demonstrate an enhanced potential for mediation that is able to deal with the contingency of a world greater than but including the human. Yet this requires a new understanding of mediation itself.

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP0774107, Dynamic Media] and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Partnership Grant, Immediations; art, media and event].

Notes on contributor

Andrew Murphie's research is at the junction of digital and networked media, philosophy, and contemporary technics and ecologies of practice. He is Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. He is founding Editor of the Fibreculture Journal, which for more than 10 years has published on digital and networked media via Open Access, and the Fibreculture Book Series with Open Humanities Press. He is the co-author of Culture and Technology (Palgrave, 2003) and has published numerous articles and book chapters on new media, art and design, including ‘Convolving Signals: Thinking the performance of computational processes’ (2013) in Performance Paradigm, ‘Hacking the aesthetic: David Haines and Joyce Hinterding's new ecologies of signal’ (2012) in Journal of Aesthetics and Culture and ‘Performance as the Distribution of Life: from Aeschylus to Chekhov to VJing via Deleuze and Guattari’ in Cull, Laura (ed.) Deleuze and Performance (Edinburgh University Press). With Anna Munster he has presented a live-mixed audio-visual artwork at the International Symposium of Electronic Art (San Jose, 2006).

Notes

1. Translation modified in an important article by Erich Horl (2013).

2. As Erich Horl sums it up: ‘For Nancy […] what is uncovered and exhausted in the twentieth century […] is not sense as such, but merely a specific sense of sense [that] appeared to have emerged with the Western, occidental sense of sense […] Today […] involve[s] being exposed to the withdrawal of meaning, and to this exposition as sense’ (Horl 2013, 11).

3. Immediation is precisely not understood as either interaction (that is, between pre-given subjects or objects) or ‘mediated intersubjective exchange’ (Massumi 2011, 73).

4. This discussion does not apply to all documentary involving digital and networked media. It is a question of new affordances and tendencies.

5. Bear 71 has also been exhibited as an installation and in performances with live music.

6. Alanna Thain drew this documentary to my attention some time ago. Although I have not yet read either of these works on Leviathan, see Thain (2013) and Kara and Thain (2014 forthcoming).

7. Castaing-Taylor notes ‘a combination of intent and accident’ (in MacInnis [2013]).

8. See Sarah Waterson's use of GoPros in Laika's Dérive: the dogs de tour in this respect (<http://laikasderive.sarahwaterson.net/>).

9. For Whitehead prehension is ‘a complex process of appropriating into a unity of existence the many data presented as relevant by the physical processes of nature […] Life implies the absolute, individual self-enjoyment arising out of this process of appropriation’ (Whitehead 1938, 150–151).

10. At times, Nancy sees the new kind of sense as still inhabiting the departure of onto-theological guarantee, trying to make sense of its absence.

11. For projects using RGBD, see <http://www.rgbdtoolkit.com/index.html> and <http://rgbd.tumblr.com/>.

12. Another example of this is the ‘mobile-mentary’. See Max Schleser's discussion at <http://mina.pro/dr-max-schleser/>.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DP0774107, Dynamic Media] and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [Partnership Grant, Immediations; art, media and event].