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Conference introduction by Richard Grusin, recorded May 4, 2012, at the “Nonhuman Turn” conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
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Plenary talk by Erin Manning, recorded May 3, 2012, at the “Nonhuman Turn” conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
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Opening keynote by Brian Massumi, recorded May 3, 2012, at the “Nonhuman Turn” conference at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Center for 21st Century Studies.
Frankenstein films have always been as much about the technological animation of a monster as they are about the medium’s own ability to animate still images. In all of its renderings, Frankenstein also carries traces of the gendered struggles encoded by its first creator, the novel’s author Mary Shelley, who describes the creation of the famous monster — the visual centerpiece of every Frankenstein film — in far less detail than she devotes to the assembly and violent last-minute destruction of its would-be female companion. Films such as James Whale’s classic Bride of Frankenstein (1935), Terence Fisher’s Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), or Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) consummate this forbidden act of female creation — i.e. the creation of and not by a woman. They oscillate then between their represented storyworlds and a sort of “frenzy of the visible” (as Linda Williams puts it in her classic study of pornography), consisting in these cases of both a filmic objectification of the woman and a foregrounding of the extradiegetic, medial means of her animation.
Quantic Dream (the French game studio most famous for Heavy Rain) follows in this tradition with their recent demo video “Kara,” shown at the Game Developer’s Conference 2012 in San Francisco (March 5-9) and embedded here. The artificial woman’s body is the vehicle by which the technology itself of animation — the realtime rendering of audiovisual content on a PlayStation 3 — can be made the object of attention. The shifting figure/ground relations between diegetic and non-diegetic levels are made concrete in their correlations with the game of peek-a-boo played with the female android’s body: we see right through her, into the deepest recesses of her artificial anatomy, but a hint of clothing prevents any indecent sights once the envelope of her skin is complete.
The — unseen — engineer marvels, “My God!,” as he reflects on the implications of Kara’s unexpected development of sentience, and on the fact that, despite his better judgment, he refrains from dismantling her and allows her to live. Standing proxy for the spectator in front of the screen, the engineer’s exclamation is also centrally about directing our attention towards the visual surface of the screen — both towards the erotic attraction of Kara’s (supposedly) breathtakingly beautiful body, and towards the assemblage of machinery and code that is capable of bringing it to life.
According to Quantic Dream, the program code/video demonstrates the emotional depth that video games are capable of generating. Clearly, though, it is designed above all to demonstrate technological sophistication — and recalling that the spectacle is rendered in real time on a PS3, it is indeed quite impressive. But if emotional maturity and depth were really at stake here, would it be necessary to instrumentalize the female body in this way? Finally, though, we see here a further demonstration of the continued persistence of the Frankensteinian model — with all its problematic intertwinings of biological, technological, sexual, and media-oriented questions and themes — in shaping our fantasies and imaginations, both for better and for worse, with regard to our visions of the (near) future and the possibilities it holds for novel anthropotechnical relations: whether in the field of android-assisted living or in the space of our living rooms, where in the name of “playing games” we have rapidly grown accustomed to interacting with nonhuman agencies.
Say what you like about the addition of contemporary music to silent films, or about the use of digital techniques that stretch “restoration” projects close to the domain of original creation…. But whatever you say, the combination of this “resurrected” copy (as Tom Burton of Technicolor Restoration Services puts it) of Méliès’s Le voyage dans la lune (1902) — which is not a Ted Turner-type colorization job but based on an original hand-colored print — overlaid with music from AIR’s new album (also called Le voyage dans la lune) is just plain awesome!
(Read more about the restoration project here, and check out AIR’s website for the album here)
[brightcove vid=1428803844001&exp3=71239018001&surl=http://c.brightcove.com/services&pubid=18140073001&pk=AQ~~,AAAABDk7jCk~,Hc7JUgOccNrJEfCrmXm47o33h5TBn3UD&lbu=http://www.zeit.de/video/2012-02/1428803844001&w=300&h=225]
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8XAlSp838Y]
In his classic work on “the play element of culture,” Homo Ludens (1938), Johan Huizinga writes:
“Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.”
In the meantime, posthumanists of various stripes, actor-network theorists (or ANTs), speculative realists, and scholars in the fields of critical animal studies, ecocriticism, and media studies, among others, have challenged the notion that culture “always presupposes human society.” In these paradigms, we are asked to see octopuses as tool-users with distinct cultures of material praxis, objects as agents in their own right, and “man’s best friend,” the dog, as a “companion species” in a strong sense: as an active participant in the evolutionary negotiation of human agency. The reality of play in the nonhuman world, which Huizinga affirms, would accordingly be far less surprising for twenty-first century humans than it might have been for Huizings’s early twentieth-century readers.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLclGPr7fj4]
Still, the situation is not completely obvious. Consider Tillman the Skateboarding Dog (see the videos above) or his various “imitators” on Youtube. Can we say, with Huizinga, that Tillman “[has] not waited for man to teach [him his] playing”? Certainly some human taught him to ride his skateboard (and waveboard and surfboard etc.). Furthermore, the imbrication with human culture goes further as Tillman’s riding becomes a spectacle for human onlookers, users of Youtube, and viewers of Apple’s iPhone ads (in which he appeared in 2007):
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qObhmS8zX8M]
And yet it’s not the genesis or the appropriation but the independent reality of Tillman’s play that’s really at stake, i.e. not whether he learned the material techniques of his play from humans or whether humans profit from that play in various ways, but whether Tillman himself is really playing, whether he is an agent of play, when he appears to us to be playing. Is there any reason to deny this? After watching several more clips of Tillman in action, I am inclined to think not. We might raise any number of ethical, political, or other concerns about the treatment of animals like Tillman (who do, after all, have to undergo some sort of training before they can play like this — and training of this sort is work, hardly just fun and games). But, regardless of these questions, these video clips would seem to serve an epistemological (evidentiary) function, as they attest to the factual occurrence of a state of play (and associated affects?) in the nonhuman world. They militate, that is, against the view that pet owners unidirectionally play with their pets (by throwing sticks for dogs to fetch, for example), instead granting to animals an independent play agency and distributing the play between human and nonhuman agencies.
Anyone who has lived with an animal might find all of this quite unsurprising, and yet Tillman’s feats would seem to have a philosophical, metaphysical relevance, as illustrations of a nonhuman agency in a robust sense — or as phenomena that are poorly accounted for (in the terminology of speculative realism) by “correlationist” philosophies that deny the possibility of any but a human perspective on the world.
In the realm of media, a non-correlationist view of play as distributed amongst human and nonhuman agents, enmeshed in ensembles of organic and machinic embodiments, has emerged in game studies, where Ian Bogost and Nick Montfort’s platform studies, Alexander Galloway’s algorithmic aesthetics, as well as various applications of posthumanist inflections of phenomenology and actor-network theory, to name a few, all unsettle the primacy and coherence of the human in the play of agencies that is the video game.
What has been missing up to this point, though, is a consideration of nonhuman animals in relation to games’ technical agencies. This is understandable, of course, as most game controllers are designed for primates with prehensile thumbs, and many house pets seem not to understand the basic conventions of — an admittedly anthropocentric — screen culture (I’m thinking of Vivian Sobchack’s cat in The Address of the Eye).
Leave it to Tillman the Skateboarding Dog, then, to point the way to a new field of inquiry — a thoroughly posthumanist field of game design for gaming animals, or a critical animal game studies (which might be critical of the role of animals in games culture as well as recognizing animals themselves as critical gamers):
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdgO3cEYYTw]
All jokes aside, though, Tillman’s virtual skateboarding raises some interesting questions for game studies by reframing familiar topics of immersion and identification. Surely, we will not want to impute to Tillman an Oedipal conflict, lack, or any of the other structures of the psychoanalytic apparatus that (as a carryover from film studies) is sometimes invoked to explain human involvement in onscreen events, and yet some form of embodied identification is clearly taking place here. What lessons should we draw with regard to our own gameplay practices?
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8dJicEtrGs]
Apart from superheroes, politics, Photoshop, and video games (see yesterday’s post), two other obsessions interests of this blog over the past several months have been Bollywood and Lady Gaga. There are, of course, reasons for all of these things: my interest in superheroes is related to my work on comics, and they’ve been brought together with American politics (and especially #OWS) in ways that highlight the importance of visual and social media at the current moment, while, at the same time, I’ve been teaching a seminar on game studies this semester. Then there’s our still ongoing Bollywood Nation film series (in which three films have been screened so far, all starring Shah Rukh Khan), and I gave a presentation on Gaga last week at our conference on “Cultural Distinctions Remediated.” Strangely, all of these things are starting to come together: here, Shah Rukh Khan interviews Gaga on Indian television, going so far as to raise the prospect of Gaga acting in a Bollywood movie!
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_Jz408w3W0&w=560&h=315]