Re: <nettime> Digital Humanities Manifesto

[Lloyd Dunn <ll@detritus.net>]

I must correct a technical error that has crept into these discussions
at least twice.

Analog film frames are not digital. The case in point is simply this:
you can take the letters of the Bible and re-arrange them to produce,
for example, War and Peace.

But you _cannot_ take the frames of, for example, "The Birth of a
Nation" and use them to produce, say, "Psycho".

The point is that a text is assembled from a finite set of fixed,
conventional, symbols called letters. The number of texts that can be
created from the same finite set of letters is infinite.

Each and every frame of film is unique, each an analog work in itself
(the same as a photograph), and is infinite in variety. You can
probably re-arrange the shots (each a collection of frames that
interdepend to produce the illusion of movement) in a given film to
produce an infinite nubmer of new films (assuming you allow repetition
of shots) but, it seems certain to me that the collection of films
so produced will not exibit the same level diversity (most of them
would be difficult to distinguish one from the other) that any random
collection of books from any library would.

Lloyd Dunn > ll@detritus.net
PhotoStatic > pwp.detritus.net
The Tape-beatles > psrf.detritus.net




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