Incompleteness

Today’s media objects cannot exist in any finished form not because they can’t, or won’t, but because what we value most about them is their incompleteness. There is no properly finished product any longer; nothing is complete. DVDs have shown us that when we watch a movie, we are simply watching one version of that movie, that there were other camera angles, other edits, other endings, other lines spoken, other scenes. In the “deleted scenes” feature of the Donnie Darko DVD, director Richard Kelly laments, I wish we could have kept this scene, but we couldn’t. And yet there it is, archived. And of course there are many other scenes, other versions, that are not archived. It is not that films were ever complete before, but rather that the digital archive elevates incompleteness to the level of commerce and, perhaps, art.

In his savage lecture/essay “Art . . . Contemporary of Itself” (2003) Jean Baudrillard writes that “The adventure of modern art is over. Contemporary art is only contemporary of itself. It no longer transcends itself into the past or the future. Its only reality is its operation in real time and its confusion with this reality.” Surely, some of the emptiness one feels after spending some time on the Rhizome.org website, for instance, comes from the sheer abundance of art projects, art projects that are ever-concerned with a sort of madness of indexing, a madness of database. One recent curation, "Day-to-Day Data," includes "physical bar charts" that allows users to respond to the question 'what did you do last week?' by taking one of the five brightly colored button badges whose slogan best sums up how they spent their time."

Soon, this project will be archived in the Rhizome ArtBase, which now includes 1,600 such projects. An impressive archive, to be sure, but of what? Perhaps its most distinctive feature is its incompleteness: it is ever-growing. There is a perpetual re-contextualization, as new art that is added shifts our perception and understanding of the art that is already there. A paradox: in the almost manic desire to archive, what's lost is permanence.

But is is not just art. Information itself--embodied now in vast warehouses filled with servers and visible to us on screens--is notable for its transparency of incompleteness. During the course of typing the sentence that you are now reading, Wikipedia was updated so many times that the list of changes was too long to fit on my computer screen. 15:19 represents the hour and seconds:

Wikipedia makes visible its incompleteness; in some ways, this is its reason for being. Under the history of edits for the entry "iPod" there is an archive of the history of the changes to the entry:

Lev Manovich has suggested that "Historically, the artist made a unique work within a particular medium. Therefore the interface and the work were the same; in other words, the level of an interface did not exist" ("Database as a Genre of New Media"). Looking at new media forms (and forums) like YouTube, we see that while the content of each individual video is stable, our access to it is through an interface that is continually changing, as the archive itself grows in a loose version of real-time:

If anything has become naturalized today--and calls out for a sort of functional demystification--it is the process of demystification itself. Because the content of Wikipedia, or YouTube, or iTunes, or Google Video, etc. is incomplete, changing, growing, it never remains still long enough to capture, to critique. The obvious fact that the very links I have provided in this post will take you to content that might be fundamentally different than the content available when I first created the links is a fact that should--but no longer does--prove astounding.

Perhaps the small sense of sadness, of exhaustion, that comes from our immersion in the database, the endlessly growing archives, rests on a secret understanding that we have finally succeeded in making machines whose real-time approximations ("updates") make it seem as if they are aging along with us. We see ourselves in them. Our own images, our own thinking, are thrown back at us, everywhere. Instead of escaping from ourselves--did this used to be the function of art?--we make vast, global networks that undermine any possibility of escape. We are the subjects of the machines we have built. Our real-time machines are elaborate mirrors of our own real time. The fact that we have built them to be perpetually incomplete (when will Wikipedia be complete? What is its final version?) is, perhaps, their most redemptive feature.

 

 

 

Comments

[Peet]

Incredible post, Nick!

"In the almost manic desire to archive, what's lost is permanence."
I love it. And so true.

[Kenneth Rufo]

Great post. I like this idea of the "transparency of incompleteness" as the form of a secret, a pact of sorts. I'll need to think about this a bit more.

[Maya]

What an awesome post!! I'm impressed with your assessment!

[Nick]

Hey Peet, Kenneth, and Maya--

Many thanks for your comments--every once in a while it comes together. (Once in a while being the operative phrase here!)

[Chuck]

I like the idea of "incompleteness" quite a bit. As my post on Soderbergh's reworking of Lodge Kerrigan's Keane suggests, the idea of a "final" version of a film is quite flawed. At the same time, I'm becoming increasingly suspicious of how "incompleteness" can be recovered, especially when it comes to selling multiple DVDs of the same film.

Maybe I've retained some of the Adorno-Horkheimer "crankiness" on this issue, but when you get a third or fourth version of The Matrix with all-new deleted scenes or never-before-seen footage, incompleteness seems to go from shattering the aura of the work of art to turning it into a marketing strategy.

[Chuck]

Another question: how is the notion of "incompleteness" associated with Wikipedia (entries changing and evoloving over time) distinct from scribal culture in which a scribe might make addenda or miscopy a phrase or re-interpret what he was copying?

Certainly that scribe's individual copy might be inalterable but even here the notion of a final copy seems ambiguous. Just asking.

[Chuck]

I *think* you've addressed my second comment when you noted that no film was *ever* necessarily complete.

[Nick]

Chuck,

I appreciate the comments. On the one hand, I recognize how important it is to historicize new media. Like you suggest, other forms of previous media have also been "incomplete." On the other hand, I think it's sometimes tempting to dismiss innovations as yet another remediation or permutation of older forms. Something like Wikipedia is incomplete on a whole other level. For me, this tendency to downplay innovation has a lot to do with the academic institutionalization of film/media theory, a process that Robert Ray and others have critiqued so eloquently.

[Chuck]

Nick, there's a degree to which my comment was probably "self-critical." I do think there are significant differences in new media, but I also find myself wanting to challenge my own tendencies to valorize the new, probably for reasons realted to my own Frankfurt School-oriented training.