Michele Pierson

Department of English and Cultural Studies
University of Melbourne
m.pierson@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au

 

The November 1997 issue of Wired magazine featured a special report on the future of Hollywood filmmaking (“Hollywood 2.0 Special Report: The People Who Are Reinventing Entertainment”). In the Hollywood of the future there will be no film. Theatres will not be theatres. And feature films will be created on desktop computers for less than $1,000. The cinema of the future promises at once to deliver filmmaking into the hands of home-computer users and to make actually going to the movies an entertainment experience more akin to a trip to a theme park. Hollywood 2.0 is do-it-yourself cinema and Holodeck Enterprises all rolled into one. The report does not suggest that making movies for CD-ROM, DVD, or on-line delivery is the same thing as having one’s digital creations projected in one of Gerard Howland’s 360-degree, 3-D full-motion theaters. That’s not how things work in the future. Hollywood 2.0 still only offers would-be “creatives” the choice between producing low-resolution “art” films for the small screen, and trying to get a piece of the big-screen action elsewhere. And despite the closing of a number of high-profile special effects houses in 1996-97 (Buena Vista Visual Effects, Warner Digital Studios, and Boss Film Studios), the special effects industry is still the best representative of this fantasy-elsewhere that Hollywood 2.0 has to offer.¹

 

The “Hollywired Index” that accompanies this special report plots the emergence of Hollywood 2.0 in terms of the history of computer generated imagery (or CGI) in Hollywood cinema. A check-list of “firsts” for CGI in feature films lists the first completely computer generated sequence in a feature film (“Genesis effect” in Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan); the first completely computer generated character (“Stained-glass knight” in Young Sherlock Holmes); the first morph (Willow); and the first computer generated main character (“T-1000” in Terminator 2: Judgment Day). Similar lists have been a recurring feature in a magazine that imagines a readership intensely fascinated by the production of computer generated imagery. The very first issue featured an article on the special effects company Pacific Data Images (Quinn, “Beyond The Valley of The Morphs”). Subsequent issues have featured articles on effects house Digital Domain (Rothman, “Digital Deal”); Digital Domain’s co-founder, James Cameron (Parisi, “Cameron Angle”); and ILM’s George Lucas (Kelly and Parisi, “Beyond Star Wars“). Special effects were also the cover story for the December 1995 issue–which featured an article on the history of the Hollywood special effects industry (Parisi, “The New Silicon Stars”), and another on the making of Toy Story (Snider, “The Toy Story Story”).

 

The regular features on the Hollywood special effects industry, mini-profiles of computer animators, and reviews of entertainment applications for computer graphics-based programs are only the most obvious sites where special effects figure in the magazine as content. In “Fetish” (a regular section that reviews the latest electronic gizmos for self-proclaimed and would-be hardware fetishists), readers are regularly addressed as producers of special effects. This is a trope that also frequently appears in advertising copy for multimedia and special effects hardware and software.

 

Wired is not the only magazine that features articles, advertising, and artwork that displays computer-enhanced and computer generated images in this way. Mondo 2000 may have seen its heyday, but it was once the lifestyle magazine of choice for the wired-at-heart. And along with the crash courses in “DIY TV” and interviews with the Hollywood digerati, it too has fed readers’ home-production fantasies with sumptuous, digitally enhanced photo-montages and glossy, full-color computer generated images. It is Wired, however, with its saturation level advertising, high-res, digital-art-effects, and extensive coverage of the entertainment and consumer electronics industries, that provides the best site for examining some of the economic, technological, and popular-cultural rationalities that have molded and shaped the look of computer generated imagery (or CGI) in recent years.

 

This essay looks at some of the ways Wired visualizes, discusses, and alludes to computer generated imagery, focusing in particular on how frequently visual and discursive references to special effects appeal to readers’ fantasies of producing such images themselves. In the early 1990s, computer generated special effects became a major attraction of science fiction cinema. As well as representing the techno-scientific wonders demanded by science fiction narratives, the computer generated images in films like The Abyss (1989), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Jurassic Park (1993), Stargate (1994), Johnny Mnemonic (1995), and Virtuosity (1995), also presented the techno-scientific achievements of the filmmaking and special effects industries to cinema audiences.

 

Over the years, film and cultural critics like Vivian Sobchack, Brooks Landon, and Scott Bukatman have offered compelling accounts of the techno-cultural matrix in which computer generated imagery has emerged as a new kind of visual spectacle on the postmodern mediascape. But their work has, on the whole, looked less closely at the popular and sub-cultural resonances of a form of spectacular image production which has also produced a distinctly popular aesthetic. The computer generated imagery featured in the science fiction cinema of the early-to-mid-1990s was bracketed for mainstream cinema audiences–both by the formal organization of the films themselves and by the formal and informal networks of information about special effects that now play such an important role in the contemporary entertainment experience. This imagery was both a techno-scientific tour-de-force for the special effects industry and a new kind of aesthetic object. Mapping some of the cultural contours of this new aesthetic is therefore another project of this essay.

 

The Consumption Junction

 

With the exception of the seminal work by Sobchack, Landon, and Bukatman in science fiction studies, critical commentaries on CGI in Hollywood cinema have paid scant attention to aesthetics. Hollywood has typically been seen as a technologically and aesthetically conservative institution–in many ways, a justified perception. But while Hollywood has reacted conservatively to new technologies in some areas of film production, it has also opted in some areas for technical novelty over any strict calculus of risks. To take an example from the early 1950s, the aesthetic project governing Hollywood’s experiments with 3-D formats was arguably conservative, driven by a centuries-old quest for illusionism, realism, and mimesis. However, these experiments also represented a technologically adventurous–if ultimately unsuccessful–bid to bring cinema into the third dimension.

 

Movies made in 3-D were widely pilloried by critics of the day. They were criticized for being gimmicky and juvenile, or for having stupid stories, or no stories at all. Most of the films made in 3-D between 1952 and 1953 used a dual-strip process that required two strips of film to be simultaneously projected onto the screen. The two images thus produced were meant to be perceived as a single, three-dimensional image when viewed by audiences through special polarized glasses; but if the projectors were not in perfect synchronization and/or correctly separated from each other, the effect would fail. The 3-D process was plagued by technological problems every step of the way: the cameras were bulky, film stock and printing costs were exorbitant, and synchronization was rarely achieved in projection. For a time, however, films made in 3-D formats were also popularly perceived to be the most technologically adventurous movies in theaters. Even after their moment of mass popularity was over, they continued to invite the delight of a new audience demographic: the techno-buffs.

 

Hollywood’s experiments with 3-D in the 1950s differ in many important respects from its experiments with CGI in the early 1990s. Not only is the structure of the film industry different, so is the context of film reception. 3-D and CGI were also produced by different kinds of technologies. Assessing the cultural implications of these differences requires methodologies capable of identifying them. Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen address this issue in the introduction to Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, arguing that new methodologies are needed to deal with the cross-media nature of new computer technologies. Their work points out that developments like CGI are not anchored to cultural institutions in the same way that film is anchored to cinema (4). The fact that the history of CGI spans so many applications has implications for the way that history is written even when it is narrowed down (as it is here) to the history of CGI in Hollywood feature films. This last point is an important one: cultural analyses of new technologies ought to be different from cultural analyses of older technologies just (and not only) because the circumstances of their development, application, and consumption are different.

 

Like the wide-screen formats that replaced it, 3-D cinema was born out of technological experimentation aimed at creating an immersive experience for spectators. The films that defined the look of CGI in the early 1990s, on the other hand, constructed a very different spectatorial relation to the images projected on the screen. Far from being designed to make spectators feel, as Bukatman once described it, that “[they] are there (even if [they’re] not)” (“The Artificial Infinite” 263) the cinema of this period was designed to focus attention on the disruption of cinematographic space by the insertion and installation of a markedly different technological and aesthetic object.

 

By 1996, Hollywood science fiction cinema was already moving away from a mode of arts-and-effects direction that put the display of computer generated images at the center of the spectatorial experience. But in these early years, computer generated images became the focus of intense public scrutiny and the site of popular speculation about the aesthetic possibilities of new imaging technologies then coming to market.

 

A number of factors have contributed to the prominence of consumer fantasies about spectacular image production in the 1990s. It could be argued that such fantasies of production arise inevitably when the interests of powerful industrial sectors converge–in this case, the entertainment, consumer electronics, and information technology industries. But such analysis fails to account for more diffuse processes involved in this phenomenon.² Writing about the widespread media interest in entertainment applications of virtual reality technologies in the early 1990s, Philip Hayward commented that although much of this coverage suggested that recent innovations had only just burst onto the scene, “[a]nalysis reveals a more gradual pattern of diffusion through a range of (sub)cultural channels whose character and concerns have molded the public image and perception of the phenomenon itself.”³ Much the same might be said of the way the public image and perception of special effects has been shaped over the same period. Indeed, many of the cultural forms that Hayward identifies as having contributed to the popularity of discourses about virtual reality–music videos, rock and fringe culture magazines, computer games, and cyberpunk–have also helped popularize discourses about special effects.

 

Journalisimo⁴

 

Wired’s post-feminist posturing and consistent editorial support for a free-market, techno-libertarian stance on government regulation of information technology and telecommunications have repeatedly been the focus of dissent from readers and critics alike.⁵ More difficult to pin down, the magazine’s visual gestalt has also captured the attention of cultural critics interested in the ramifications of a design sense that has appeared, to many, to have made of the computer generated image, not so much a new kind of aesthetic object, as a new kind of corporate logo.

 

This is not the first time that reflection on this aspect of the magazine has centered on, or invoked, computer generated special effects. In “Wired Unplugged“–a revised version of a review which first appeared in Educom Review–Mark Dery begins by imagining that the magazine itself simulates the polymorphous perversity of a computer graphics effect.⁶ Invoking an already iconic moment in the history of CGI in Hollywood cinema, Dery wonders if Wired isn’t “actually the shape-shifting android from Terminator 2, disguised as a magazine.” In its use of digital production technologies, he likens Wired to “the liquid metal T-1000, whose ‘mimetic polyalloy’ enables it to morph into ‘anything it samples by physical contact.'” Dery is a perspicacious commentator on contemporary technocultures. His analysis in Escape Velocity of the subcultures that have emerged among underground roboticists, cyber-body artists, postmodern primitives, and cyberpunk rockers is happily devoid of the “cyberdrool” that sometimes passes for theoretical reflection at the more ecstatic end of cultural commentary on new technologies. For Dery, these subcultures are appealing because, while they take it as a given that “technology is inextricably woven into the warp and woof of our everyday lives,” they also manage to “short-circuit the technophile-versus-technophobe debate” that tends to follow this assumption (Escape Velocity 15). Some, it would seem, even go so far as to turn a critical eye on that ubiquitous new formation, “the military-industrial-entertainment complex.”

 

The same, however, cannot be said for the readership that Dery imagines for Wired, this “magazine simulating a simulation” (“Wired Unplugged”). If he chastizes Langdon Winner for taking Wired’s hyperactive visual design as a sign that the magazine lacks substance, it is because Dery is too perceptive a critic not to recognize that Wired’s slippery, refracting visual style reverberates with meanings of its own. Curiously, he posits its “aesthetic of overt manipulation–of ‘overdesign'”–as the graphic equivalent of the opening line of William Gibson’s Neuromancer: “‘The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel'” (3). This seems an odd choice, not least of all because, unless you press your nose to the screen, the flickering fuzz that appears on a television set tuned to a dead channel seems strangely monochrome. It is not an image, one would have thought, that is readily identifiable as the textual equivalent of Wired’s day-glo graphical interface. The point of this reference is to draw a parallel between Gibson’s vision of the future and Wired’s professed desire to produce a magazine that looks “as though it had literally landed at your feet as a messenger from the future.”⁷ But Dery’s suggestion that “both Gibson’s world and Wired’s remind us that technology is transforming our environment into a profoundly denatured, digitized–and, increasingly, corporate–place” (“Wired Unplugged” 3), only succeeds in foreclosing upon any further speculation about what this future might look like.

 

In its rhetorical effects, Dery’s writing blurs any distinction between Wired’s visual style and something approximating its world view. On one level, this seems entirely appropriate. For as Dery himself points out, it is not for nothing that Marshall McLuhan is listed as Patron Saint on the magazine’s masthead. The problem with this thinking lies not in trying to ascertain the cultural meaning of Wired’s visual style. Much less does it lie in refusing to separate style from content (or medium from message). For much of this review it lies, rather, in the assumption that Wired’s world is so dominated by the view of “corporate futurists, laissez-faire evangelists, and prophets of privatization,” that no meaning can be imagined for it that does not fit this ideological configuration (2). When it is not being retrofitted as corporate-futurist, Wired’s aesthetic is figured as an attempt to simulate “the sensation of bodily immersion familiar from video games and techno-thrillers, where warp-speed, gravity-defying flights through cyberspace, seen from a computer-generated point of view, offer gamers and moviegoers a taste of cyborg vision” (4). But to the extent that it is really intended to signal a new mode of visualization, the metaphor of “cyborg vision” all too neatly elides important differences between the ways that computer generated images produced for VR, movies, games, and magazines actually circulate in popular culture.

 

More prosaically, it might be noted that some aspects of Wired’s visual design are tuned into the anti-formalist, cut-and-paste expressionism being explored in fringe culture magazines like Ray Gun and Inside Edge. Much of the layout in these magazines features Barry Deck’s expressionist typefaces (which have names like Caustic Biomorph, Cyberotica, and Template Gothic). The contents pages of each issue of Wired are preceded by a four-page digital art spread that includes quotes from an upcoming article. This regular feature–along with the contents pages themselves–plays with all manner of digital art forms, including those emanating from the cyberdelic end of the techno-fringe. Images and typeface are combined in ways that suggest the editorial brief for these pages is to capture a mood, attitude, or tone. Not fully-formed ideas, but snippets of ideas, float or flash through the magazine at the speed of a turning page.

 

Despite the fact that Ray Gun’s founder, David Carson, has been commissioned to create ads for Pepsi, Nike, Citibank, and TV Guide, or the fact that still more advertisements have been inspired by Carson’s approach to design, Ray Gun continues to be perceived by many cultural commentators as a new edge publication.⁸ It would seem that no corporate takeover has yet managed to cast a shadow over its claims to push back the boundaries of conventional design. In reviews of Wired, Ray Gun is also the magazine that most often crops up as a contextual reference for Wired’s own design sense. “Wired,” says Dery, “is the limit case for postmodern technodazzle in graphic design, pushing the eyestrain envelope to just this side of unreadability” (“Wired Unplugged” 1). In parentheses he adds: “It falls to magazines with a younger, fringier demographic, like Ray Gun and Poppin’ Zits, to shatter the legibility barrier into postliterate fragments” (1). For Dery, then, comparisons between Wired and Ray Gun are intended to raise questions about the fate of critical thinking and rationality in a so-called “postliterate” design space. But neither Wired’s broad-bandwidth broadcasting of the corporate-futurist message, nor its simulation of the cyborg’s terminal gaze, allow much room for the fragmentation of meaning that we have been given to understand occurs in this space. As far as critical ciphers go, both suggest the restitution of an organizing rationality that makes it difficult to conceptualize the magazine in any other terms.

 

It falls to cyber-sceptic Keith White to offer a reading of Wired’s design strategy that resolves some of the discontinuities in Dery’s review. If Dery’s own reading is perhaps best understood as a discontinuous series of short takes on a theme–chosen more for their immediate impact than their relation to each other–White’s review is the monotheistic voice of rationalist indignation. In a review originally published in The Baffler (subtitled “The Journal That Blunts the Cutting Edge”), and currently available on-line, White argues that Wired’s much-touted design sense speaks nothing so much as good marketing: “Don’t be sucked in” is the White message–whatever this packaging owes to publications like Ray Gun, Sassy, and Inside Edge, this material has most certainly been relieved of any genuinely radical edge. According to White, Wired’s co-optation of the radical “look” of these magazines extends the same logic that launched Apple’s Macintosh computer. The famous 1984 Chiat/Day television commercial presented the Macintosh to its Super Bowl audience as a conformity-smashing innovation in computer design. Thereafter, says White, “the course that ideologues of the computer should take” had been set. In putting “together an ideological packaging for information technology that screamed nonconformist,” Wired’s founders simply “picked up where the TV advertising left off” (“The Killer App” 2).

 

White’s claim that Wired’s vision of the good life is remarkably consistent–“money, power, and a game boy sewn into the palm of your hand”–has real critical bite (3). However, it might also be said of this critique that it fabricates consistency where it might not otherwise exist. Take for example the argument that throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and early ’80s, the computer industry suffered from a massive public relations problem that stemmed from the Cold War. This was a time, according to White, when the counterculture and corporate America shared a suspicion of computer technology. If information technology was “to achieve proper acceptance in the business world,” then it would have to “undergo a gigantic face-lift.” This critical revamp was achieved, says White, by appealing to the business world’s increasing fascination with “notions of chaos, revolution, and disorder” (2).

 

Here, then, is the missing link between Wired’s chaotic, disorderly–to say nothing of revolutionary–visual style, and its corporate, free-market ideology. The only problem is that this narrative relies on a strange cultural bifurcation. For where do the first technofreaks–with their whole-earth lifestyles, low-tech equipment, and high-tech predilections–fit into this picture? The first communities of computer programmers that sprang up in places like Santa Cruz County in the 1960s and ’70s were an important site for the development of a sensibility –if not yet an aesthetic–fascinated by chaos, disorder, and random phenomena.

 

The fringe technocultures that clustered around the first bulletin board systems (BBSs) in the mid-1970s did not simply disappear into Start-up Valley ten years later. Indeed, the contemporary “ravers, technopagans, hippie hackers, and other cyberdelic subcultures” that come in for such close critical scrutiny in Dery’s Escape Velocity have their techno-cultural roots in these kinds of communities.⁹ Dery’s criticism of these subcultures bristles with impatience. His most scathing criticism is reserved for their “techno-transcendentalism” and “high-tech millenarianism”–all that flaky cyberbabble about “consciousness technologies” and “magickal programming” (21-22). As well it might be. Dery fears that “[t]heir siren song of nineties technophilia and sixties transcendentalism seduces the public imagination with the promise of an end-of-the-century deus ex machina at a time when realistic solutions are urgently needed” (49); and this fear may, in fact, turn out to be well-founded. It is worth remembering, however, that the do-it-yourself ethos of the cyberdelic fringe was nourishing future experiments in digital art–fractal art, genetic art, multimedia–well before the PC boom of the mid-1980s.

 

In “Cyberhype,” a review essay for World Art magazine, the Australian cultural critic McKenzie Wark offers what is perhaps the most persuasive reading of how spectacular image production and the commodity form converge in Wired. As in Dery’s and White’s reviews for Educom Review, it is not Wark’s argument so much as his rhetorical style that proves most persuasive. His avatar for this essay is a “jaded, bloated 30-something former punk” (67) whose street-weary, intellectual cool is reminiscent of science fiction novelist Rudy Rucker’s jaundiced anti-heroes. Wark (it seems reasonable to continue to identify him in this way), casts a disparaging glance at what he sees as being Wired’s corporate-cultural mission: the production of cyberhype.

 

According to the Wark lexicon, cyberhype is hype about hype: it is hype about multimedia, cyberspace, and virtual reality. It is “the swanky image of nothing but the promise of ever niftier images” (66). And it is virtually indistinguishable from marketing hype. Wired and its sister publication Mondo 2000 emerge from Wark’s review as magazines for the “first off-the-shelf romantic revolution.”¹⁰ His reflection on the spectacular imagery in these magazines leads him to speculate that the commodity form and the spectacular image form have, in fact, “become one.”¹¹ What seems to bother him about this fusing of art and advertising is not the idea that it has become impossible to distinguish between the two (although this is bad enough), but rather that anyone with half an idea and access to the right sort of equipment can produce these spectacular image-commodities.

 

Advertising, he argues, is no longer the sole preserve of the big manufacturers and media outlets: “Now anyone can sell!” And not just classifieds and garage sales: “anyone can make images of themselves and sell themselves as makers of images, and distribute those images through the endless capillaries of the new micromedia: cable TV access channels, do-it-yourself ‘zines, covert and even overt self-promotion on the Internet, info-hucksters puffing each other up on the big cyber-communities like the Well” (69). The more alarmist Wark’s tone becomes, the more one begins to suspect that what he finds most worrisome about this proliferation of images is that it raises the possibility that we now live in an era when art is no longer possible. For Wark, art seems to stand in this instance as the sign of a mode of production that says no to spectacle and to cyberhype.

 

Wark is no cyber-refusnik, so it is hard to imagine that he really means to signal the impossibility of something called computer, or digital, art. It is even harder to imagine him arguing that the democratization of this technology–the fact that it is within reach of “a great number of the ever expanding info hacking class”– has led, inexorably, to the conflation of image production with something called cyberhype, or the spectacle, or the commodity.¹² After all, this claim betrays a sneaking disregard for the desires of the populace that does not sit easily with Wark’s more populist impulses. Again, it is worth remembering that neither Wark’s nor Dery’s reviews of Wired were specifically written for an academic audience. They are tactical pieces: written quickly and designed for maximum impact. But they also raise important questions about some of the ways that computer generated images are being produced, distributed, and above all, consumed.

 

Just Do-It-Yourself

 

Although advertising for multimedia technologies in Wired regularly appeals to consumers’ fantasies of becoming image-makers themselves, this advertising tends (interestingly) not to represent this possibility visually. This is especially noticeable in a magazine otherwise filled with images. There are advertising campaigns in Wired that are sites of spectacular image production–the Absolut Vodka campaign is a case in point–but ads that actually advertise computer imaging technologies are more likely to refer to their placement in a magazine already filled with images and high-profile image-makers in order to invoke the imaging capabilities of their products. An ad for Autodesk video editing and animation software, for example, claims that with the company’s vast range of plug-ins, “you’ll not only be doing things typically reserved for high-end workstations today, you’ll be doing the hottest things in this magazine tomorrow” (Wired January 1995, 61). Perhaps the most interesting feature of this advertising, however, is its appeal to consumers not in the market for “high-end workstations.” While the advertised cost of something like Media 100’s video editing system (under $30,000) clearly puts it out of range for the vast majority of home producers of multimedia, much of the advertising for multimedia authoring tools that appears in Wired is pitched to the home producer. In fact, the entire magazine is rather clearly structured to appeal as much to the do-it-yourself fantasies of would-be home producers as to the purchasing power of imagemaking professionals.

 

Articles like one featuring an interview with the low-budget filmmaker Scott Billups feed consumers’ fantasies of home production in a number of ways (“Shot By An Outlaw”). Most obviously, Billups himself is represented as something of a home producer (in this case of low-budget horror movies). The article is promoted on the front cover with an invitation to “Make Special Effects in Your Basement.” Inside, the title page brazenly declares: “Who needs ILM? Completely digital movies will be made by lone ranger cinemagicians like Scott Billups. Welcome to Basementwood.” As for the article itself, much is made of the fact that Billups performed the duties of producer, director, cinematographer, virtual set designer, computer animator, and digital editor and compositor for his low-budget special effects extravaganza, Pterodactyl Woman of Beverly Hills.

 

Like articles in other publications that cover special effects and effects-based productions–Cinefex, American Cinematographer, Computer Graphics World–this article contains the usual product reviews. Billups reviews in some detail available graphics platforms (“[p]ound for pound, dollar for dollar, the new 150-Mhz PCIs render at least two times faster than comparable SGIs” (204)) and software packages (ASDG’s Elastic Reality Morphing package gets the thumbs up). Notably, he evaluates these products in terms of affordability and/or user-friendliness. It matters less that the cost of these tools still puts them beyond the reach of the majority of would-be home producers–or that attaining the level of knowledge and proficiency needed to use them may entail long periods of trial and error (not to mention expensive training)–than that their advertised accessibility makes them available as objects for consumer fantasies of home production.

 

Wired binds the logic of image production to technological consumption through fantasies of home-production. In the magazine’s advertising, special effects frequently figure as metonyms for spectacular image production. Nowhere is the appeal of producing special effects illustrated more clearly than in a long-running advertisement for the Kingston Technology Corporation. The ad, which first appeared in December 1995, features a sepia-tinted photograph of a woman hysterically pulling at her hair. Her hairdo and clothes are circa 1950. The text box beneath the image reads: “You’re creating special effects for the next blockbuster, so why are you using B-movie memory?” (97). In the decision to spectacularize the subject of production (represented as the hysterical, and notably feminine, image-maker), over either the object of production (special effects) or the advertised product (Kingston memory), the ad draws attention to the arbitrary relation between image and product–to the fact that it appeals less to the desirability of the product itself than to the fantasy of spectacular image production.

 

Undeniably, this fantasy is both consumerist and utopian. Just as clearly, the language and iconography used in much of the advertising and artwork in Wired is at best ambiguously gendered and at worst smugly masculinist. On these grounds alone, more criticism of the magazine should be welcome. Nevertheless, some of Wired’s critics may have moved too quickly to dismiss consumers’ fantasies of home production as unworthy of critical attention. Behind this dismissal lies the assumption that these fantasies only mask the extent to which consumers of new multimedia technologies don’t actually produce anything with them–or at least, nothing worthwhile. But it may just be that it is still too early to tell what effects the utopian fantasies surrounding these technologies will have on the image-making futures being dreamed about in basements, bedrooms, and home studios right now. It may also be too early to determine the extent to which fantasies of home production either facilitate or impede individuals’ abilities to conceptualize collective forms of cultural production. Cultural critics must continue to investigate how these fantasies play out in relation to other cultural activities, other sites of consumption and interactivity, if they wish to find out how the concept of “do-it-yourself” figures in them.

 

Digital Expressionism

 

When histories of computer generated imagery in Hollywood science fiction cinema speculate about aesthetic parameters, they almost always describe a quest for simulation.¹³ There are, however, other ways of understanding this history–ways that do not regard the aesthetic project governing the production of CGI as one that always, or necessarily, values photorealism over visual novelty and experimentation. Where computer generated special effects are concerned, the relation between CGI and simulation is not simply isomorphic.

 

In “From Abstraction To Simulation: Notes on the History of Computer Imaging,” Andy Darley argues that early interest in the aesthetic possibilities of computer art displayed a modernist preoccupation with visual abstraction and novelty (43-46). In the 1960s and ’70s, artists like John Whitney, Stan Vanderbeek, and Lillian Schwartz produced a number of abstract films using computer graphics. Whitney’s Matrix III (1972) and Arabesque (1975) were concerned, for instance, with the formal arrangement and movement of light, line, and color. But in the history of CGI that Darley later maps out in these “Notes,” any interest in pushing the aesthetic possibilities of computer art in new directions has all but disappeared by the 1970s. By then, he argues, this project had been overtaken by research into “the formidable copying or simulational power of computers”–a project which (unlike “art”) would repay the high levels of capital invested in it by corporate and state-funded R&D bodies with lucrative commercial applications (49). Wrested from the hands of artists, the history of computer generated imaging becomes, at this point, a quest for simulation: or, rather, a drive to produce computer generated images that are indistinguishable from photographs.

 

But the end-of-art was not yet nigh. In the 1970s, computer animation became the site of renewed interest in research centers like Bell Laboratories, MIT, and the University of Utah. Many of the computer animation techniques that were developed during this period–techniques for achieving motion blur, texture mapping, computer-controlled rotoscoping–were, in fact, designed to facilitate the development of commercial applications for computer simulation such as flight simulation, scientific and medical visualization, and computer-aided-design. However, a number of artists maintained their interest in experimental computer animation. William Moritz is an historian of computer animation and author of a brief history of experimental computer animation included as part of an on-line festival of experimental works produced by Christine Panushka and sponsored by Absolut Vodka (Absolut Panushka). In Moritz’s telling of this story, abstract animation continued to flourish in the 1970s in films produced by artists like Robert Breer and Jules Engel (who also worked on Disney’s Fantasia).

 

Moritz wants to make the history of experimental animation a history of films which, as he says, have been made by artists who have tried “to make something personal, exploring techniques to find exactly the right look to express it–something new, fresh, imaginative, dealing with significant subject matter, made independently and often single-handedly.” For him, this means excluding cartoons and animated films produced by major studios, as well as short works produced by animators working in the field of computer generated special effects. However, it is impossible to keep these intersecting fields entirely separate. The animation program founded at the California Institute of the Arts by Jules Engel in 1969 not only fostered a number of independent filmmakers, but also provided a training ground for animators who would later continue their work in the Hollywood film industry. Graduates of Cal Arts include people like Tim Burton, Henry Selick, and John Lasseter. But a history of computer animation interested in further teasing out the institutional contexts of experimental research in computer animation would also, of course, include someone like Pixar’s founder, Ed Catmull, a graduate of the University of Utah whose research also led to the development of commercial rendering software (Renderman) while at Lucasfilm.

 

It could be argued that there have always been continuities, as well as discontinuities, between the kind of computer generated imagery produced for feature film production and the kind of imagery produced by animators working outside of the industry. Interestingly, Moritz himself chose Ed Emshwiller’s Sunstone (1978) as “one of the classic computer graphics images.” Ermshwiller’s luminous, pulsating “happy face” is, indeed, an iconic computer generated image. But a term like “photorealistic” doesn’t describe it any better than it describes any number of other “classic” computer generated images, either those produced as experimental animation, or those produced as special effects for science fiction cinema.

 

Techno-futurism

 

Much of the computer generated imagery that found popularity with audiences in the early-to-mid-1990s represents the refinement, not of a realist aesthetic that takes the cinematographic image as its point of reference, but of a hyperreal electronic aesthetic that takes the cinematographic image as its point of departure. For all its ability to produce stunningly plausible objects–solid, textured, light-refracting bodies–computer generated special effects during this period also showed a marked preference for imagery displaying the kind of visual properties that can only be achieved in the hyperreal electronic realm of computer generation. Too bright and shiny by far, the hyper-chrominance and supra-luminosity characteristic of CGI effects in this period imbued the digital artifact with a special visual significance. This significance was augmented by a style of arts-and-effects direction that, by bracketing the computer generated object off from the temporal and narrative flow of the action, offered it to the contemplative gaze of cinema audiences.

 

In their creation of this imagery, directors, effects designers, and computer animators were also, of course, responding to the knowledge that by the early 1990s, familiarity with new media technologies had altered cinema audiences’ perceptions of the sort of effects that could be achieved with computer generated imagery. This point was illustrated by “lone cinemagician” Scott Billups. Reflecting on the expectations of a generation of moviegoers raised on computer and video games for special effects imagery, Billups suggests that one of the things they want is “high chrominance,” which, as he says, “is not a film attribute: [t]here are colors you can get in the electronic realm that you just can’t get on film” (Parisi 204).

 

While morphing is now a familiar special effects technique–having been used in countless television commercials, music videos, television programs, and Hollywood films–it might be remembered that it too has been a defining feature of many CGI effects. Morphing is a technique that transforms one image into another by stretching each image sequence and then cross-dissolving between the two distorted images. It endows computer generated and optically-photographed images alike with a hyperreal elasticity. Although the effect is achieved electronically, morphing is also used to create the kinds of visual puns that were so finely honed by traditional cel animation artists for cartoons. Even though the technique has been demonstrated many times over, morphs are still used to create subtle (and not so subtle) visual jokes that, again, draw attention to the synthetic properties of this imagery.

 

In the introduction to Future Visions, Hayward and Wollen use the term “techno-futurism” to describe the rationale behind the production and marketing of new media and communications technologies (3). Techno-futurism, they argue, works as a classic ideological paradigm: always representing new technologies as an improvement on older ones. But the term techno-futurism might also be re-deployed to describe an aesthetics of CGI effects in Hollywood science fiction cinema which is specifically electronic. For it is the electronic properties of this imagery–as much as the technological wonders that this imagery ostensibly represents–which have come to be figured in popular discourses on computer generated special effects as the very sign of a future in which technology figures as a force to be reckoned with.

 

Techno-futurism, then, describes an aesthetics which is at once inclined towards simulation and mimesis–and a decidedly synthetic, visibly more plastic, mode of visualisation. Pulled, on the one hand, towards photorealism and, on the other, towards a synthetic hyperrealism, the computer generated imagery in the Hollywood science fiction films of the first half of this decade exhibits an aesthetic that plays across these two poles. And more than anything else, it is this electronic reconfiguring of the cinematographic image which gives key CGI effects in these films their special reflexivity. The drive for simulation–long acknowledged, within the industry, to be something of a digital mantra in the field of CGI effects production–describes but one half of this aesthetic project.

 

Art-Effects

 

Wired differs from other publications that regularly report on the special effects industry in being neither a magazine specifically produced for industry professionals (like Cinefex, American Cinematographer, Computer Graphics World), nor a magazine primarily addressed to fans, buffs, and aficionados of the cinematic digital domain (like Cinefantastique, Starlog, Sci-Fi Universe, SFX). But it shares with both types of publications a specifically aesthetic interest in computer generated special effects.

 

Many of the computer generated images featured in Wired exhibit the recombinant, hyperreal aesthetic characteristic of some of the 3-D imagery being created in this new medium by artists like “demon animator” Steve Speer (“Speer’s Head”) and Australian computer animator and multimedia artist Troy Innocent. In reviewing Innocent’s artwork for PsyVision–a fifty-minute music video made in collaboration with the Australian techno-music label Psy-Harmonics, Darren Tofts describes it as “uncompromisingly synthetic.” The imaginary spaces created for PsyVision’s eleven sections are represented in Tofts’ review as explorations of the limits and possibilities of computer animation. Each section draws “on a succession of symbolic forms and visual dynamisms, ranging from fractal geometries, kaleidoscopic pulses and textural ‘soft spaces’ to fantastic landscapes, info-overload collages and liquid architectures” (31). Some of the images that have been reproduced for the pages of World Art magazine have been taken from Innocent’s interactive database, Idea-ON>!. Innocent’s “rigorous donut” and glistening “iconbods” playfully rework the rod-and-cone candy look of much of the CGI that appears, for instance, in television advertising.

 

In Wired, an article focusing on the graphical possibilities currently being explored in new on-line environments like “Graphical MUDs”–virtual worlds where animated avatars interact with each other and their environments–comes accompanied by three double-pages of spectacular, and somewhat satirical, visual interpretations of the synthetic inhabitants of these new electronic worlds (“Metaworlds”). Representing the work of three different artists–Steve Speer, Lynda Nye, and Michael Crumpton–this imagery shares with Innocent’s artwork an exploration of the synthetic visual effects that can be achieved in the hyperreal electronic realm of computer generation.

 

Some of the best examples of imagery featuring the hyperreal, synthetic properties, and visual punning, idiomatic of the work of these contemporary artists, can be found in the TBWA Chiat/Day Absolut Vodka campaign which until 1996 ran on the back cover of Wired. (It has since been replaced by a campaign for Stolichnaya Vodka.) Andy Warhol kicked off the Absolut Vodka campaign in 1985 with his rendition of the absolut vodka bottle (reproduced on the back of Wired October, 1994). Since then, the campaign has featured, and advertised, the work of many painters, sculptors, jewellers, fashion designers, and photographers. Much of the artwork featured at the back of Wired was exclusively “produced by and for” the magazine. Covers by Steve Speer (“Absolut Speer”) and the computer graphics designers and artists at Troon Ltd. (“Absolut Kelly”), exhibit a playful aesthetic that combines an abstract expressionist’s exploration of the technical and aesthetic possibilities of this new synthetic medium with the pop artist’s retro-visionist eye for re-figuration.

 

On the printed page, these glistening images lack the luminosity and hyper-chrominance they would have in an electronic format like video or CD-ROM. A video signal is comprised of luminance (brightness), chrominance (color, including saturation and hue), and sync (alignment). While all colored signals have both luminance and chrominance, black and white signals lack chrominance. Artists working in the digital realm have looked to exploit the specifically electronic properties of this new medium. At present, however, the printed page still reproduces a more lustrous, higher resolution image than most on-line delivery systems, which tend to deliver grainy, pixelated images that in most instances still take some time to download. The computer generated imagery that glosses the pages of Wired magazine are visually more spectacular than anything that Hotwired–the magazine’s on-line counterpart–has to offer. By comparison, Hotwired’s clunky frames, day-glo wallpaper and occasional animated graphics offer a computer graphics environment lacking in visual effects.

 

The creation of three-dimensional computer generated imagery is a labor-intensive enterprise which, in addition to involving the long periods of gestation, conceptualization, and experimentation that are familiar to artists working in any medium, also involves long spans of rendering time. As one might expect, rendering time increases exponentially in the case of animated images. Other considerations of application and technique aside, computer generated imagery does not lend itself particularly well to the make-do, fly-by-night ethos of monthly magazine production. This is one reason computer generated images are actually so scarce in Wired. Sprinkled across a design space where collage and photomontage–not even détournement–still define the graphical style of the magazine, these images are designed and placed to arrest the gaze of the magazine browser like so many special effects.

 

By treating the computer generated special effects produced by computer animators and artists working in the special effects industry as aesthetic objects, by featuring this work alongside the work of other artists working in digital media, and by showcasing the computer generated imagery produced by and for the magazine and its advertisers, Wired blurs the distinctions between special effects and art, commerce and art, and art and advertising–disinctions that critical commentaries on the history of computer generated imagery have so far held apart. No critical consensus has yet emerged to account for the cultural and political valences of this blurring. But rather than interpreting this development as a sign of the end of art, this essay has sought to examine some of the contexts in which CGI has emerged as the site of populist fanasies of home-image production. In Wired, appeals to these fantasies are invariably underwritten by a consumerist imperative to keep up with the very latest in computer imaging technologies.¹⁴ However, these appeals are just as regularly staged around special effects. For, more than any other entertainment application for CGI, science fiction cinema has treated the computer generated image as an aesthetic object. Although it is unclear what aesthetic and/or editorial directions Wired will take under its new owners–Condé Nast–it seems certain that the magazine will continue to map contemporary technoculture’s fascination with the computer generated image.

 

Notes

 

Thanks to Paulina Borsook for answering my email all the way back in August 1996. We need her, I think, to remain skeptical. Thanks also to the reviewers of an earlier version of this article.

 

1. For more on the economic state of the special effects industry see Kris Goodfellow, “Mayday! Mayday! We’re leaking Visuals!: A Shakeout of the Special Effects Houses,” New York Times 29 September 1997.

 

2. For an account of this argument see Herbert I. Schiller, “Media, Technology, and the Market: The Interacting Dynamic.” Schiller argues that although no one factor explains the development of the special effects industry, one contributing stimulus stands out: “the intensifying effort to maintain and extend personal consumption and to develop it abroad” (37).

 

3. See Philip Hayward, “Situating Cyberspace: The Popularization of Virtual Reality,” in Hayward and Wollen, Future Visions (130).

 

4. After John Thornton Caldwell, “journalisimo” refers to a mode of discourse characterized by an “excessive style.” See his Televisuality: Style, Crisis, and Authority in American Telivision (360).

 

5. See Paulina Borsook, “The Memoirs of a Token: An Aging Berkeley Feminist Examines Wired,” in Wired Women.

 

6. This review is part of a special report titled “Do We Really Want To Be Wired?” It is Scott Bukatman, of course, who coined the term “cyberdrool” in Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (189).

 

7. Dery attributes this quote to Wired’s creative director, John Plunkett, and his collaborator and partner, Barbara Kuhr.

 

8. For an interview with Carson focusing on Ray Gun’s critical reception see Tom Eslinger and Brian Smith, “American Typo,” World Art.

 

9. See Dery, “Turn On, Boot Up, Jack In: Cyberdelia”, in Escape Velocity (41). Also see Sandy Stone, The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age. According to Stone, these early fringe communities were decidedly counter-cultural in their choice of lifestyle. However, she also points out that the communities of programmers that settled in the hillsides surrounding San Lorenzo Valley only superficially resembled the neighbouring hippies “whose grubby, marginal, and financially precarious lifestyle was not a thin cover over graduate-level degrees and awesome technical proficiencies” (106). She adds that “the depth of this gulf” seems also to have been “oddly invisible to the technofreaks” who, on the whole, preferred to regard their hippy neighbors as fellow-travellers (106). Stone describes the “technosocial context” in which these programmers lived and worked as “a milieu dense and diverse, wild and woolly, a bit crazed in places, and shot through with elements of spirituality and cultural messianism” (108). Her brief cultural history of one of these communities–the ill-fated CommuniTree Group–is the story of how an unprotected and unstructured conference environment was eventually brought down by a small band of teenage hackers who were able to exploit the vulnerability of a system that made itself available to all-comers. The next wave of designers were forced to reckon with the trade-off between the maintenance of social order and their desire to see this equilibrium achieved through the principles of organic regulation and freedom of expression. Suffice it to say that subsequent on-line conferences were considerably more regulated environments.

 

10. See Wark, page 68. In referring to Mondo 2000 as Wired’s “sister” publication, I do not mean to suggest that this gendering of the magazine is in any way unambiguous. I have used it to mark an ongoing engagement with Scott Bukatman’s analysis of the way the two magazines negotiate gender (both visually and discursively). See his “Mondo Babes & Wired Boys,” Educom Review, available at http://educom.edu/web/pubs/review/reviewArticles/30622.html.

 

11. Wark writes: “Now that the means of domination, the commodity form, the spectacular image form, have become one and proliferated such that they are obvious to everyone, we choose not to refuse them, but say yes! yes! yes! with deliberate abandon” (“Cyberhype” 69).

 

12. What Wark actually says is that “[t]he means of domination are not only obvious to all, they are within the reach of the credit cards of, well, not all, but a great number of the ever expanding info hacking class, who make their living driving the economy forward on ever expanding waves of cyberhype” (69).

 

13. For a wide cross-section of such histories, see Steven R. Holtzman, Paul Virilio, Lev Manovich in Timothy Druckrey, and the catalogue essays accompanying the exhibition in Photography after Photography, eds. Hubertus v. Amelunxen et al.

 

14. See Simon Penny, “Consumer Culture and the Technological Imperative: The Artist in Dataspace,” in Critical Issues in Electronic Media, 47-73. In this essay, Penny explores “the position of the artist who uses technological tools, with respect to the larger [i.e., economic] formations of technologically mediated culture” (48).

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