Reviewed by Lauren Carr

Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds is the 26th-volume in the series “Electronic Mediations,” which looks at the impact of digital technology on society and culture.  Author Timothy Murray’s background in researching and teaching interactive digital arts and early modern studies has placed him in the perfect position to understand how early modern conceptual frameworks have influenced video, film, screen-based installations and new media art. This work brings together highly-conceptualised discourses from art history, philosophy, cinema studies, and new media theory, and seeks to discover the relationship between cinematic new media art and the baroque.

Digital Baroque is about more than just historical claims and concepts explored by new media screen artists and theorists. Murray is adamant that understanding the baroque will offer further insight and exploration in new media theory:

What I argue to constitute the important legacy of this work is not simply the thematic corollaries between early modern history and contemporary art but how their engagement with baroque and early modern conceptual and artistic precedents provides the electronic arts with psychosocial paradigms that are significantly broader and more elastic than those framed by modernism, the avant-garde, or even the philosophical imperatives of cultural and subjective dialectics — these are the critical frameworks that seem to have dominated new media theory and criticism. (xi)

In essence, we need to move beyond the theoretical boundaries that have been set by modernism and the avant-garde to understand how the qualities of the very medium itself—temporal, representational, reconfigured—are akin to the very qualities of baroque: “analogical disjunction, temporal shifts, spatial simultaneities and conceptual incompossibilities” (xi).

In reading this book, I approached the theoretical concepts from my own perspective as a new media artist with little understanding of the cinema in philosophy. Murray’s classification of particular screen-based new media art as part of the genre of cinema opened my eyes to new concepts and theories that aren’t explored in other new media readers. I was particularly interested in his observations on the presentation of work of leading British artist Keith Piper, whose video installation works examine “cultural collectivities” and represent “racial, cultural and national diversity” (24). When Piper’s work is presented as a CD-ROM retrospective, Murray notes that this format “diminishes the colossal form and almost mystical milieu of Piper’s museum installations” (152). Representing screen-based works outside of their original context—such as a large projection in a gallery—can certainly diminish their effect, and this will prove an ongoing concern for artists who work with the screen.

The digital environment as a cinema aesthetic is unique in the opportunity it provides for the user to copy, edit, re-work, and remix all kinds of media and even history as part of the editing process. For Murray, it is important to appreciate “how contemporary experiments in video and electronic discourse contribute to the retrospective understanding of artistic concepts, visions and practices of our early modern past” (xi). So in order to look forward, we need to look back. It’s also comforting to know that art wasn’t the only field facing the ‘new media means death of the old’ debate. There is plenty of discussion here on the supposed death of cinema, or at the very least the ‘amateurisation’ of it from the influx of video platforms like YouTube.

One drawback of this volume is that the readership will be limited to those who have a sound understanding of philosophical ideas from philosophers such as Deleuze, Derrida, Leibniz and Lacan. Their language, as reflected here, can be complicated at times, and I must admit that I kept the dictionary close, but this is testament to Murray’s highly developed insight into digital culture and aesthetics. He is building the path for new discussion, theory, and debate on new media theory.

Perhaps keep a pencil handy to write notes in the column, as there’s some theory in between the covers of Digital Baroque. Expect phrases like “philosophical paradigms” or “Deleuzian psychophilisophical approach” and “nonlinear temporal folds intrinsic to the digital form”; and this is just the abstract on the back cover. Just be warned that “intellectually groundbreaking” is code for don’t-set-this-text-as-your-next-book-club-reader, unless you happen to be part of an art/cinema theory discussion group.

Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds
(2008)

by Timothy Murray
University of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816634026
320pp US$25.00