At the roots of digital: in praise of a rhizomatic archaeology
Francesco Casetti
research: Seminar
At the roots of digital: in praise of a rhizomatic archaeology
Francesco Casetti
Against the idea that the advent of digital media is a sudden ‘revolution’ triggered by the availability of binary code and electronic devices, I suggest a less linear and deterministic scheme. Indeed, this advent is due to the convergence of a number of factors, including technological innovations, cultural technologies, perceptual skills, and bodily gestures. Many of these factors have a long and independent history, which started in the 18th and 19th centuries, and became apparent with the emergence of new optical dispositifs, new labor routines, new scientific discoveries and new technological applications. In the second half of the 20th century, by interacting with each other, these different factors elicited a sort of ‘critical mass’ that prompted the emergence of a new mediascape.
Such a theoretical framework demands a twofold research strategy. On the one hand, we must ‘unpack’ the digital and trace the individual threads of each of these factors, not only in their achievements but also in their unexpressed possibilities and their failures. On the other hand, we must grasp the effects that the merging of these factors had on the whole system. Hence an archeology of the digital that avoids causality and teleology, and that, instead, takes the form of a rhizome. We have a series of routes that often develop under the track, and which, as they spread out on the ground, intersect, divide, sometimes get lost, perhaps to resume a little further away.
The seminar is aimed at drawing a first overall map of the rhizome that presides over the advent of the digital, and at discussing the methodological implications that such an approach entails.
Biography
Francesco Casetti
Francesco Casetti is Thomas E. Donnelley Professor of Humanities and Filmand Media Studies at Yale. He has worked extensively in Italy, and has been a visiting professor at Paris III, Iowa, Berkeley, and Harvard. He has been a Fellow at Otago University, IKKM in Weimar, and BildEvidenz in Berlin. With Jane Gaines, he founded the Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories. Among his books, translated into several languages, Dentro lo sguardo. Il film e il suo spettatore (1986) Teorie del cinema. 1945-1990 (1993), L’occhio del Novecento. Cinema, esperienza, modernità (2005) e La Galassia Lumière (2015). With Federico di Chio he has co-authored Analisi del film e Analisi della televisione.
research: seminar
At the roots of digital: in praise of a rhizomatic archaeology
Francesco Casetti
Against the idea that the advent of digital media is a sudden ‘revolution’ triggered by the availability of binary code and electronic devices, I suggest a less linear and deterministic scheme. Indeed, this advent is due to the convergence of a number of factors, including technological innovations, cultural technologies, perceptual skills, and bodily gestures. Many of these factors have a long and independent history, which started in the 18th and 19th centuries, and became apparent with the emergence of new optical dispositifs, new labor routines, new scientific discoveries and new technological applications. In the second half of the 20th century, by interacting with each other, these different factors elicited a sort of ‘critical mass’ that prompted the emergence of a new mediascape.
Such a theoretical framework demands a twofold research strategy. On the one hand, we must ‘unpack’ the digital and trace the individual threads of each of these factors, not only in their achievements but also in their unexpressed possibilities and their failures. On the other hand, we must grasp the effects that the merging of these factors had on the whole system. Hence an archeology of the digital that avoids causality and teleology, and that, instead, takes the form of a rhizome. We have a series of routes that often develop under the track, and which, as they spread out on the ground, intersect, divide, sometimes get lost, perhaps to resume a little further away.
The seminar is aimed at drawing a first overall map of the rhizome that presides over the advent of the digital, and at discussing the methodological implications that such an approach entails.