·~{dRNn}~·

Now I have become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Robert Oppenheimer after the first test of the atomic bomb.

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Defence of the doctoral thesis Portable Moving Images by Ricardo Cedeño Montaña 
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Institute for Cultural History and Theory | Interdisciplinary Laboratory Image Knowledge Gestaltung

Sophienstraße, 22a. Berlin, Germany

Portable Moving Images from ~{dRNn}~ on Vimeo.

Public defence of the doctoral thesis: Portable Moving Images: a Media History of Storage Formats

 Ricardo Cedeño Montaña

Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries small-gauge film formats, consumer videotape formats, and low-resolution digital video files fostered the easy generation and transmission of moving images. Each of these media have emphasised the media’s portability as the defining condition for media production. The subject matter of this dissertation is a description of the media storage formats that have constituted the material and technical basis of amateur and DIY productions of moving images. It inquires into the effects that the technical features of such formats – their form and structure – have had on the visual qualities and dissemination of amateur moving images.

07 December 2016 12 pm

Interdisciplinary Laboratory Central Laboratory. 

Sophienstr 22b. 10178, Berlin,  Germany. 

The blueprint of our technical world was laid out in the 1950s.

Next, 18th November I’ll be presenting a short paper in the conference On the Epistemic Dimension of Colors in the Sciences at the Interdisziplinäres Labor Bild Wissen Gestaltung in Berlin, Germany.
 
The technical illusion of colour: from the trichromatic theory to the encoding of electromagnetic signals
 
Abstract 
Encoding schemes for producing, storing, and transmitting colour information in electronic media are based on a three-colour canon that originated in the 19th-century physiological studies of vision. During the 20th century this canon was first standardised and then implemented in several technical media. Since then it has become ubiquitous for understanding and producing the illusion of colour. This paper proposes a historical account of how the additive three-colour canon was set in the laboratory and how it was transferred over to electronic technical media.
 
The first part will focus on the scientific origins of this canon. Building on Thomas Young’s trichromatic theory, during the 1850s, Hermann Helmholtz empirically demonstrated that the three types of sensory receptors responsible for colour vision are primarily sensitive to one range of wavelengths, with one sensitive to reds, one to greens, and one to violets. His work set the blueprint for the principle of colour mixing in technical visual media, in which the weighted combination of three different colour signals suffices to form a full colour space for the human visual system.
 
The second part will focus on three implementations of this principle that have dominated electronic visual media ever since. These are: (i) the characterisation of an standard observer in the Colorimetric Resolution I by the Commission Internationale de l’Eclairage (CIE) in 1931, (ii) the implementation in the NTSC analogue television of the colour system patented in 1939 by the French engineer George Valensi, and (iii) the ITU BT.601 recommendation for encoding digital video as a three-colour component signal from 1981.
 

Next week 15 September in Chicago,  I’ll be presenting a short paper at the​ Inaugural Communication & Media Studies Conference.
 
Media Archaeology of the Digital Moving Image: Motion Prediction or the Demise of the Frame
 
Abstract
 
At the coding level, in a video codec such as H.264/AVC the otherwise basic unit of all moving images from film to video, the frame, is only an address where chunks of pixels coming from different moments in time are put together. This paper historically explores two mathematical theories from the 1940s that paved the way for the digital video compression formats during the 1990s. The first is the prediction theory by Norbert Wiener to improve anti-aircraft artillery during WWII. And the second are the crypto-analytic techniques formulated by Claude E. Shannon for the transmission of messages over noisy channels. Both theories resulted in algorithms to statistically predict missile paths and encrypt military communications. Today, they are the backbone of the video compression formats installed in discs, TV receivers, online streaming and video conferencing services, camcorders, and mobile phones. This media archaeology on the digital moving image argues that the consequence of turning each displayed picture into a rigid arrangement of pixels and its construction into the statistical prediction of the pixel’s values is dramatic. This historical analysis shows that prediction has generated an entirely new type of moving images in which the temporal coincidence of all pixels within the frame is unnecessary.
 
Inaugural Communication & Media Studies Conference.
University Center Chicago, Chicago, USA
15-16 September 2016
 
Here is the entire program:

http://www.cgpublisher.com/conferences/348/web/program-detail.html

​ Three glittering dragons to the gorget rise,
Whose imitated scales against the skies
Reflected various light, and arching bow’d,
Like colour’d rainbows o’er a showery cloud
(Jove’s wondrous bow, of three celestial dyes,
Placed as a sign to man amidst the skies). 

• Homer. The Iliad of Homer. Trans Alexander Pope. XI:198. The Project Gutenberg: Sep 2006

Befehl und Einfall. Kreativ Dialog 4 Konferenz an der BWG interdisciplinary laboratory von der HU-Berlin. 28-30 April 2016.

Compare: Comparisons

Emerson, Lori. University of Colorado at Boulder
Situating the Media Archaeology Lab: Research, Art
and the Public. Media Art History RE-CREATE 07 Nov 2015.

Source: https://youtu.be/Yhju8INkxds?t=3m33s

Compare: Comparisons

Third and final part.

1. From tactical media to post-media by Clemens Apprich

The practices of tactical media has not disappeared but merge into the everyday media. Apart from the physical layer of media the focus are the mental and the ecological. The idea is not hacking the media but building your own media.

Past the Present: Post-media as meta political and theoretical marker

Other contributions: Oliver Lerone Schultz

There is a crisis of theory in which reflection need to become mode of practice. Post mass-media to mass self-mediation. The fundamental tension defines the post-media age is that one pole of the digital media used by minorities. The other pole is subsumption. Machine subjugation understood as a generalisation to the regimes of discipline and control (Foucault and Deleuze). In subsumption everything is co-opted and appropriated.

Conclusion of the workshop

Destabilization of media, film history that consolidated around mid 1890, the same happened with gramophone, typewriter, video, radio and today’s algorithmic moment. There was a time when all channels were clearly separated today the entire context has collapsed. The post-media term should not be followed entirely from the theoretical philological stream.

Do-it-yourself and amateur practices have shaken the technological media landscape. R. Cedeño Montaña

If media are the technical supports of representation and memory, communication and consciousness, post media holds the hope that there are alternative ways to imagine and make them, and the subjectiveties they engender. A. Broeckmann