It as though all this material represented an underground network in which the only visible landmarks were the boxes and collages, and the difficulty of communicating their meaning was a source of both regret and satisfaction.
– Dawn Ades, on Joseph Cornell
All this is to say that it is a shame that QuickTime movies were ever called “movies”: in being so named, their extinction as a specifically discrete and computergraphic form of aesthetic expression was virtually preordained. And this need not have been – yet could it be otherwise? Digital theorist Lev Manovich has made the astute observation that the basic metaphors reified by computer interfaces – metaphors such as the “desktop” with its “files” and “trashcan” or the “cinema” with its practices of “cutting,” “compositing,” and virtual “camera movement” – are also, and more significantly, cultural interfaces: pre-existing and widespread cultural forms of conceptually organizing and visualizing data borrowed by a new medium that, after all, had other options. 10 Consider, for example, the developers’ documentation for QuickTime, “a set of functions and data structures” that permits applications to cooperatively “control time-based data.” QuickTime itself, we are told, is not an application, but a “true multimedia architecture”: a specific “enabling technology . . . comprised of pieces of software” that allows an “operating system to handle dynamic media” so as to “integrate text, still graphics, video, animation . . . and sound into a cohesive platform.” However, this rather open initial description turns prescriptive at its end: hence the emphatic epigraph that introduces this present section of my essay and reduces QuickTime to a “movie.” 11In QuickTime, a set of time-based data is referred to as a movie.
– Developer Documentation
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes of a character in a novel who basks in the solidity and order of his oak filing cabinet: “Everything had been designed and calculated by a meticulous mind for purposes of utility. And what a marvelous tool! It replaced everything, memory as well as intelligence. In this well-fitted cube there was not an iota of haziness or shiftiness.” 17 Despite its lack of solidity, I get the same feeling from my computer “desktop.” It reassures me with hierarchy, with clarity and order, with principled and logical menus, commands, and systems through which I can access vast amounts of information (if not intelligence). This database of information while unseen, does not seem “hidden” to me; rather, it is “filed” away in “folders” and, more deeply, in “records” and “fields.” It is rationally organized and always hypothetically available for retrieval and display. Indeed, the “well-fitted cube” that is my computer gives me access to what seems an infinite store of information (if not knowledge) – and I take comfort in the hierarchical logic of its “unhazy” and “unshifty” memory (of an order quite different than my own). Here is the logical – and “official” – organization of the “office,” of the catalog, the library, the museum, and the stock room. Here, everything has been “designed and calculated by a meticulous mind for purposes of utility.” Here, I’ve no sense of the “secretive” or “unconscious”: at worst, information gets bureaucratically “classified,” misplaced, or erased (not repressed). In sum, the phenomenology of comfort afforded by the “file cabinet” and the “database” refuses ambiguity, ambivalence, poetry. 18A well-calculated geometric description is not the only way to write a “box.”
– Gaston Bachelard
Two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.Yet “a mode enchanted by fragmentariness” which serves as “an emblem of a wholeness to be found in other times and places” cannot stand as a complete description – for we cannot ignore the presence of Cornell and QuickTime’s “memory boxes” and their fragments as themselves containers. Furthermore, their miniature size, their collector’s sensibility, and the discretion of their enclosures gain particular power from and exist always against their own containment by a larger – and marked – visual field. Both externally and internally, Cornell and QuickTime works provoke a structural and poetic tension between two different logics: one represented by the hierarchical and rational organization of the “file cabinet” and computer “desktop” where everything has its place in some comprehensive master plan; the other by the associational organization that is the psycho-logic of the “memory box” and the “hyperlink” in which everything has a relative and mutable order that, as a totality, cannot be mastered. This tension is simultaneously framing and framed.
– Gaston Bachelard
Although arguing “cinema” as a primary “cultural interface” in our engagement with the digital, Lev Manovich has used QuickTime to make a series of what he calls “little movies” that use “classic” cinematic imagery as the “raw material” of a digital exploration that interrogates the differences between these media. 29 Furthermore, all six of his “little movies” privilege and foreground the limitations of computer memory and storage space under which they are constructed and by which they are constrained. 30 Appearing in only a small portion of the lower third of a black background (itself framed within the computer screen by the web browser), all six variously explore and emphasize their miniature size and compressed nature. 31 In this regard, one called “A Single Pixel Movie” is particularly striking. To a quite literally “loopy” tune reminiscent of Laurel and Hardy’s theme music, we watch the already small square of a primitive “movie” in which a strong man holding a pole does rote exercises and is intermittently interrupted by the sound of a “blip” and a digitized circle of “light” – both “movie” and “digital blip” becoming smaller and smaller (and less and less audible) at each interruption until both are reduced to a single pixel on the screen. The effect is more compelling and poignant than the mild comedic repetition of mechanical motion and see-sawing music would seem to warrant: that is, we watch more and more intently as the already miniaturized image becomes smaller and smaller and we are aware throughout of the increasing fragility and impending disappearance not only of the oblivious optimism of the strong man and “early” cinema, but also of the QuickTime “movie” presently being extinguished from our human sight.Here the poet inhabits the cellular image.
– Gaston Bachelard
The casket contains the things that are unforgettable, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we are going to give our treasures. Here the past, the present and a future are condensed.
– Gaston Bachelard
The miniature encourages the phenomenological experience of intensity, interiority, and material preciousness by virtue of its compression and condensation of data in space. But the miniature also effects our sense of time. As Stewart points out, there is “a phenomenological correlation between the experience of scale and the experience of duration.” 57 That is, time also compresses and condenses in the miniature: it “thickens” in significance and implodes. Constrained or “nested” in a small spaces, time is reflexive: it falls back upon itself and “encrusts,” building up into the “weight” of a generalized past, or it collapses under its own weight, diffusing the present into an ahistorical and “infinitely deep” state of reverie. Thus, as Stewart says: “The miniature does not attach itself to lived historical time. Unlike the metonymic world of realism, . . .the metaphoric world of the miniature makes everyday life absolute anterior and exterior to itself.” 58 Furthermore, unlike in “real-time” and “live-action” cinema, our sense of temporality as we engage the miniature never “streams” toward the future (and this is so even when movement is involved). Temporal compression and condensation conflict with forward movement and “life-like” animation. As a result, “the miniature always tends toward tableau rather than toward narrative, toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than towards expository closure.” 59 Fragments and bits and traces of past experience exist “now” in our sight and reverie, not only evocative but also emblematic of irrecoverable “originary” moments of wholeness. These broken and poignant units of time are silent (or, put in motion, they stutter), but their static and tableau-like presence points to both the passage of everyday “life” from particularity into allegory and the great temporal mysteries of matter’s slow and inexorable emergence and extinction. (In this regard, we might remember the tendency of the “memory box” to figure and often make thematic cosmological imagery suggesting not human temporality, but the imperceptible dynamics and perspective of “longue durée”: an “almost immobile history” written not in human events, but in the cosmic temporality of geologic or climatic transformation. 60 )Thus we find that the disjunctions of temporality traced here create the space for nostalgia’s eruption.
– Susan Stewart