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Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds

by Timothy Murray
Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2008
Electronic Mediations Series 26
320 pp., illus., 22 b/w. Trade, $75.00; paper, $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-8166-3401-9; ISBN: 978-0-8166-3402-6.

Reviewed by Jan Baetens

Let's start with the good thing. Any reader interested in new media art and a state of the art overview of philosophical thinking on this subject will find in Digital Baroque a sure guide to what to see and what to read in today's screen art. The book is an excellent companion for all those who want to know how the canon of this emergent field is being organized and who are its major players, artists, critics, philosophers, institutions, and the like. Timothy Murray, curator of the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art at Cornell University, has an excellent taste, and he speaks of what he likes with a good mix of enthusiasm and inside knowledge. Moreover, he has a strong point here. Baroque is undoubtedly a hot issue, in philosophy (thanks to Deleuze), in media studies (thanks to Sean Cubitt, mainly), and in art history and cultural history (one may think here of Angela Ndalianis and of Omar Calabrese, although these authors are more eager to distinguish between baroque and neo-baroque -a distinction that Murray, quite provocatively, tends to minimize).

In spite of these real merits, however, the reading of this book may prove deceptive to many readers. Although Murray brings together the best work that has been produced for more or less two decades, while having also a clear view of which critics and philosophers are setting the agenda of today's discussions, Digital Baroque is simply (sic) too... baroque, stylistically and rhetorically speaking, to be convincing.

A first problem that I already hinted to by mentioning the possible difference between baroque and neo-baroque is that the valuable basic hypothesis of the book, namely that a reference to an early modern paradigm might fruitfully cast a new light on postmodern screen art practices, remains in permanent lack of a clear and workable set of definitions and historical contextualizations. I don't want to suggest here that Murray does not define what he means by baroque, but the given criterions are so numerous that even the best intentioned reader will get lost in the labyrinth of concepts and features. Of course, one may object that this is exactly what Murray has tried to do, namely inventing a new way of writing on baroque that mimics baroque's dizzying effects. The vertigo that baroque aims at producing with the help of decentred 'folds' (instead of well anchored points, clear perspectives and well-established hierarchies) is not without equivalent in the way this book unfolds its many centres of interest, yet most readers will more feel exhaustion than excitement, more frustration than thrills, and finally more anger than the necessary sense of challenge when one enters a new territory.

This absence of a straightforward definition, the notion of baroque becoming finally almost 'everything' (and therefore 'anything'), is unfortunately reflected at the two levels of the book's global structure and the text's basic argumentation. At the microscopic level of sentence and paragraph, the text resembles often a roller-coaster that throws the reader in a whirlpool of names, concepts, references, anecdotes, hypotheses, polemics, and so on. Even those well initiated in the issues of postmodern screen arts and baroque philosophy may find that the author is living dangerously, and in risk of killing his reader. More problematic is the fact that this associative way of systematic side-stepping does not always do justice to the artist or the work under analysis. It is of course a great source of joy to discover that two of the ten chapters of the books are devoted to Chris Marker, an all too discrete genius. Nevertheless, much space and time of these Marker chapters is taken by all kind of secondary discussions that may not be very crucial to what the reader is expecting here: instead of, once again, being remembered of Adorno and Horkheimer's 1947 attacks on the cultural industry, which Murray quite banally repeats by laughing at "that busty, big-lipped Hollywood centrepiece, Julia Roberts", one might have preferred a more down-to-earth close reading of Marker's work, which is not there. At the macroscopic level of the book, a real structure is lacking as well, for it is not clear why the 10 chapters have been ordered the way they are. Moreover, eight on ten chapters are reprints from previous articles, i.e. from texts that have not necessarily been elaborated as parts of a larger book project. The book therefore has more the structure of a catalogue than of a real book (although one can understand that in Murray's vision it would have been counterproductive to produce something with a beginning, a middle and an end).