Documentary Across Platforms

Reverse Engineering Media, Place, and Politics

Patricia R. Zimmermann

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253043481
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Essays "capturing media ecologies as varied as museum installations, film festival showings, photography, and multiple varieties of internet sharing." — Jump Cut In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering—the concept that ideas, just like objects, can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better—Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary's role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas.

PART I

PLATFORMS

1

REVERSE ENGINEERING

Taking Things Apart for the New Global Media Ecology^*

Reverse Engineering in Vietnam and Iraq

Engineers use reverse engineering to identify the components and interrelationships of a system, dismantling technologies in order to understand how their constituent parts articulate to create representations at another level of abstraction. Reverse engineering breaks codes and invents new forms, always building something better. It customizes tools for new uses in new interfaces, spaces, and technologies. Extended into a metaphorical model, reverse engineering becomes a way to conceptualize and analyze documentary media projects, combining machines, representation, and technologies in collage. In this sense, reverse engineering does not simply default to ideas such as pastiche or remixing, which center primarily on the presentational. Rather, reverse engineering can be a radical heuristic, functioning theoretically and practically to understand and intervene in the new media ecologies. It works in all levels of abstraction, taking things apart and rebuilding them in new ways.¹

A theory and practice of reverse engineering in global media ecologies can only be considered within the transnational matrix of empires divided by race, class, gender, and sexualities. It serves in this context as a conceptual metaphor, a strategy, and a tactic. Most importantly, we must reverse engineer the amnesia and anesthesia that transnational capital and authoritarianism produces, replacing it with plural geographies, temporalities, and an incessant, insistent sense of community across differences. This must be based on a historiography of contiguities, pluralities, polyphony, and polyvocality, creating a new composition. For example, digital media artist Philip Mallory Jones creates paintings where each component represents a different moment of racialized history, connecting the disparate locations of the African diaspora, from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States. His work constructs contiguities from multiple geographic spaces to reverse engineer the separations that fragment African American diaspora histories, and thus creates a new imaginary zone of racialized historical reclamation.

Digital artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko’s online open-source encyclopedia of labor conditions and manufacturing processes for consumer products provides another example of reverse engineering. By tracing a product back to its origins, her web project, How Stuff Is Made, combined economics, historical analysis, labor history, photography, science, and wikis to reveal the hidden transnational labor processes facilitating the manufacture of everyday products, moving them from the quotidian to the global.² For instance, the site revealed that nearly all US flags are manufactured in Chinese sweatshops.

A historical example of reverse engineering comes from the American war in Vietnam. North Vietnamese soldiers recycled metal from downed US warplanes, making booby traps to use against US ground troops. They refashioned US warplane tires into rubber-soled sandals that predated modern versions like Tevas and were ideal for tropical warfare.³ They also recovered footage of napalm bombing from crashed US B-52s and used it as evidence of war atrocities. US footage was edited by the North Vietnamese, smuggled out of Vietnam, and then deployed to mobilize the international antiwar movement in films such as US Techniques of Genocide in Vietnam (1968).

Moving from historiography, at the core of video image processing and image/signal manipulation, reverse engineering of tools reveals the key components of experimental digital media, film, and video practices. For example, artists and toolmakers like Bill Etra, David Jones, and Woody and Steina Vasulka built new machines and tools, using schematics to create algorithmic mathematical art in collaborative processes that predate Photoshop and Combustion by twenty-five years. One early technologist manipulated the video image simply by inserting a screwdriver into the TV itself to short-circuit its stability, combining domestic objects as tools to dismantle old images and create something new.⁴ Machinery was taken apart, recombined, layered, and collaged together to create new technologies and new imagescapes.

The use of collage in reverse engineering needs to be added to other interventionist tactics like copyleft, culture jamming, piracy, and pranks as strategies for resistance and intervention into transnational capital and empire.⁵ Earlier, the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) forged complex linkages between the hardware and software industries and the government, connections that would help the military to develop modern digital warfare.⁶ The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in 2001, broadly expanded surveillance and constituted “significant threats to civil liberties, privacy and democracy,” according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and many other individuals and institutions.⁷ For instance, the Patriot Act authorized packet-sniffing technologies like Carnivore and eliminated basic constitutional protections like the need for a warrant.

For instance, in 2000, the US Department of Defense’s vision statement, Joint Vision 2020, called for US forces to venture beyond conventional weaponry and strategy to “full-spectrum dominance” of the air, information, land, sea, and space. Alternative, independent, oppositional, and radical democratic media practices, therefore, need to expand and join forces in a countermeasure of full-spectrum resistance.⁸

A report published in 2004 by Andrew Blau and the National Association of Media Arts and Culture (NAMAC) entitled Deep Focus: A Report on the Future of Independent Media suggested the need for a conceptual shift: how might new technologies require rethinking the form and functions of media? The report suggested that the field might need to jettison 1970s thinking that positioned independent media as completely oppositional to commercial media. It argued that in these emerging public media ecologies, the borders between different domains of media practice have become blurred. The report explained that the relationship between commercial and other media has changed to such an extent that “the commercial/noncommercial distinction no longer serves the purpose it once might have.”⁹ In this restructured media ecology, inexpensive technologies have become accessible and ubiquitous, and forms, interfaces, platforms, and technologies have multiplied as a result. The popular Bush in 30 Seconds spots from Moveon.org in 2003 exemplified this, as did the marketing techniques of antiwar Flash animation circulated via email.

Deep Focus argued that computer games were “being embraced as a platform for critique and education,” suggesting that public media needed a more multiplatformed environment. The report noted that gaming is a $7 billion-a-year industry, with Americans spending more on video games than movie tickets.¹⁰ The need for expansion into multiple platforms is particularly critical because the military uses commercial war games to advance major strategic planning for innovation and training. The Department of Defense (DOD) leveraged their enormous investments in IBM, Microsoft, and Sony’s gaming ventures by deploying the advanced technological capacities of the Xbox and Sony Playstation for military purposes. A major strategic capability of the DOD resides in simulation technology, but the gaming industry’s capabilities surpass the military’s significantly. One article describing the military’s interest in war games and gamers noted that “video games made better soldiers and sailors faster, safer, and cheaper.”¹¹ In addition, the military developed its own gaming site to appeal to younger potential recruits.¹²

After the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, Osama Bin Laden was the most circulated picture on the internet. Gamers inserted his image into games so that it could be disseminated and shot at as a target. Many sites featured games where players could move the cursor to kill Osama Bin Laden and other Middle Eastern figures, militarizing the mouse and racializing the home computer screen with a national phantasm, generating youthful support for the war on terror.¹³

As a countermeasure, during the early to mid-2000s, several antiwar games inspired by reverse engineering tactics emerged on sites like newsgaming.com, watercoolergrames.com, seriousgames.org, and opensorcery.net. These projects combined interfaces and technologies—not just images or sounds—to create interactive antiwar collaborative environments. One of the most famous is Velvet Strike, an antiwar modification of the commercial multiplayer game called Counter Strike, where players join terrorists or counterterrorists. These examples suggest that the emerging new ecology for public media requires reverse engineering of not only technologies but also forms of oppositional media. This strategy requires us to consider collage not only on the visual and aural levels, but theorizing it as a new, more fluid, and shape-shifting system that layers networks, public spaces, and technologies together.¹⁴

Thus, a reverse engineering framework functions as both model and metaphor, where public media moves from images to interface, from fixity to fluidity, from object to iterative modularity, from disembodied to embodied. Covertly and without debate, the machinery of postcapitalism reorganizes empire and retreats into a dangerous invisibility. Life proceeds as usual, monolithic and somnambulant, without interruption, ignoring death and displacement.¹⁵ These alarming, reconfigured, war-without-end authoritarian regimes operating in the new media ecology require us to think about images and discursive formations, oppositional public space and technology, as endlessly mobile circulations releasing multiple layers and voices. For example, after the Abu Ghraib incident, US Army and Central Intelligence Agency images of prisoner torture in Iraq were circulated to the public. Since nearly every soldier there had access to email and cellphones, unprecedented broad and largely uncensored real-time communications during war were inevitable. As a result, senior officers at bases in Iraq were given internet kill switches to enforce control over information flows in military networks.¹⁶

In these larger contexts, using reverse engineering to reconsider the form, function, and practices of public media requires action beyond manipulating images and sounds; it necessitates interrupting the networks in order to break into the machine and reorganize its parts. Independent and radical public media must operate inside the machine itself in order to function as a countermeasure to transnational global capitalism.

Malaysia and Geneva

According to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, copyright industries constitute the United States’ largest export, exceeding even the export of military products.¹⁷ However, boundaries between the two have become blurred. In the early to mid-2000s, the military’s insistence on full-spectrum dominance (control over all dimensions and locations of battle) demonstrated the growing interdependence between communication industries and the military. According to Bruce Berkowitz in The New Face of War, 90 percent of military communications travel over commercial links.¹⁸ He points out that decentralized digital communications have shifted war from the ground onto the networks. Because military fronts no longer exist as they once did, warfare relies on more dispersed tactics such as swarming and maneuvering to create disorder.¹⁹ This new warfare also employs cyberattacks to disrupt digital communications and infrastructure and leverages digital support for ground operations. For example, a PalmPilot device was commercially produced specifically for special agents in Afghanistan and Iraq that provided GPS mapping, instant translation, scenario planning, tactics, and real-time communication. If captured or hit, agents were instructed to crush their PalmPilots with their boots and guns.

A salient example of this merger between new technologies and the military is the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California (USC), bankrolled by the Department of Defense and the gaming company Electronic Arts. This alliance demonstrates the synergy between the entertainment industries, military applications, and simulation technologies.²⁰ Like the military, transnational media corporations seek their own full-spectrum dominance by owning or investing in as many distribution platforms as possible, a form of vertical and horizontal integration and market control. As Nitin Govil from the South Asian digital collective Sarai pointed out, Interpol asserted that intellectual property piracy finances global terrorism through DVD sales of Bollywood films, Disney children’s movies, and Windows software. Interpol linked the global circulation of pirated information commodities with the rise of asymmetrical warfare between combatants using divergent and unpredictable tactics.²¹

Many political economists have commented on how post-Hollywood transnational media corporations have become intellectual property clearinghouses, commanding monopoly power over copyright, licensing, and trademarks. The Motion Picture Association (MPA), representing the seven major studios affiliated with transnational media corporations, uses their famous rating system as a front for their underlying goal: the worldwide policing of media industry copyright protections in order to solidify transnational corporations’ monopoly.²²

Piracy has existed for commercial purposes for some time, but in the mid-2000s, it was deployed politically as a counter to transnational copyright monopolies. In February 2005, Downhill Battle, a political group supporting participatory cultural practices and a fairer music industry, organized one hundred pirate screenings of Eyes on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Gina Marchetti
• Introduction
• Part I: Platforms
• Part II: Reversals
• Part III: Histories
• Part IV: Speculative Engineering
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author