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Gothic Media Objects, by Elizabeth Effinger(11 Oct 2010)
By Mr Stuart Lindsay
“Media always already yield ghost phenomena” (Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, 22)
“But ghosts, a.k.a. media, cannot die at all. Where one stops, another somewhere begins” (Kittler, 130)
One of my research interests is the collusion between new media and the gothic. Specifically, I am interested in gothic media objects or artefacts that speak to the concealed circuitry between death and technology. Embedded within gothic media is the call that we consider the essence of our current state and remember the dark side of ‘progress’ and false promise of immortality invested in new technologies. Found in each artefact or scene is the gothic reminder that death and technology co-exist. The hope, in questioning the relationship between the gothic, new media and death, is to explore the ways the borders of the gothic might be further expanded. The artefacts that this blog investigates share as reminders (perhaps, remainders) of our finitude, our drive for immortality and the always already gothic history and nature of our communication technologies. Encrypted within these gothic technologies is their history, namely their militaristic origins. As Friedrich Kittler in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter writes: “The history of the movie camera thus coincides with the history of automatic weapons. The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets...In the principle of cinema resides mechanized death as it was invented in the nineteenth century: the death no longer of one’s immediate opponent but of serial nonhumans...With the chronophotographic gun, mechanized death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage. What the machine gun annihilated the camera made immortal” (124). Feedback loops distilling disembodiment, trains modeled after torpedoes, the chronophotographic gun and haute couture, technologies resurrecting and modeling models. It is without question that we are engaged by and with death, by and with our technologies.
Some questions I hope to work through in this blog include: What is gothic media? What is gothic about media? Is media always already gothic? Is there a particular ideology to gothic media that separates itself from other types of media? Can we think of there being such a thing as an ethics of gothic media? Is such a question a paradox considering the ways in which the gothic is haunted by its own fake origins (cf. Botting, The Gothic, 2), its own “ghost of the counterfeit,” to use Jerrold Hogle’s phrase (154)? In what ways can we speak about a gothic materialism, a gothic substratum to today’s technologies? Have gothic figures from the past (ie. the gothic heroine) crossed over a transgenerational and transdisciplinary limit? Are haute couture models like Kate Moss and Coco Rocha the twenty-first century gothic heroines?
1. Kate Moss
Catherine Spooner’s observation in Fashioning Gothic Bodies (2004) of how the “erasure or effacement of the body beneath the mask is a recurrent feature of Gothic fictions” (6), rings even more true for Gothic media. In media objects, however, the mask, veil, or shroud itself is also effaced and digitally displaced. Such is the case in what is arguably the most decadent, gothic new media scene: the fashion world. And no one knows this better than Kate Moss – or, at least the virtual Kate Moss.
The scene I refer to is a life-sized 3D image of Kate Moss, of her turning and dancing, a holograph-like image produced for the climax of an Alexander McQueen fashion show. On March 3, 2006 in Paris, Moss, arguably the world’s most famous model, mysteriously appeared in a glass pyramid surrounded by a cloud of angelic chiffon. She appeared in hologram format on the catwalk, her first ‘appearance’ in years, due to her drug use admission – something itself captured on recordable technology, to truly recall Kittler’s warning of the existence of “a storage medium for each kind of betrayal” (85). Her appearance, set to the theme song from Schindler’s List (?!) closed the show. Click here to watch a YouTube video of the performance.
As Vogue editor-at-large, André Leon Talley said, “It wasn’t about the Kate Moss hologram. It was all about the Kate Moss hologram” (qtd in Gillmor, 84). As Joelle Dietrich, an Associated Press writer, suggests, the otherworldly appearance of Kate Moss acts as a "symbolic resurrection for the supermodel, who lost several advertising contracts after she was pictured in London tabloids last year linked to drugs." Although the technology is not technically a hologram, it functions to ‘appear’ as one, as The Independent fashion editor Susannah Frankel reports:
Of course, McQueen being McQueen, there was a catch. Moss in person was, in fact, nowhere to be seen. Rather than stalking the bare floorboards alongside her contemporaries, she had been filmed prior to the show and away from the crowds and her image was projected via an optical device, widely known as Pepper's Ghost, an effect first employed by the mid-19th century chemist John Henry Pepper for a production of Charles Dickens' The Haunted Man.
While holographic technology isn’t always part of theatrical productions for stage or catwalk, it is commonly found in the cockpit screens of fighter jets, and on driver’s licenses, passports, and credit cards as a way to detect counterfeits. While the hologram is historically tied to transgressions of its own, when coupled with Kate Moss who notoriously has a history of her own, we are left with an extremely potent object. While the spectral holographic image of Moss presents us with a beautiful haute-couture vision of the living dead, the technology that produces this image is also linked to deadly origins.
If gothic fictions, according to Jerrold Hogle’s, “make ghostly, monstrous, and/or ancient both what we fear as horribly dissolving our present identities and what we desire as symbolically moving us beyond our conflicted circumstances and ideologies into an imagined resolution of them where the contradictions somehow interact harmoniously” (173), then, do gothic technologies do the same? Perhaps this can be resolved by recognizing the ways in which our media has fictions built within, via the fantasies we have about them, that magical “aura” we grant the media object. Or, might we understand (gothic) new media itself more like Lacan’s lamella? It is indestructible, seemingly infinitely malleable, and it multiplies. Could we account for the gothic nature of media in the same terms that Zizek uses to describe the alien in Ridley Scott’s movie: “pure life, indestructible and immortal”? New media has both gothic origins and gothic lives. Media = gothic. In the case of Kate Moss, the holographic-like image merely repeats the way numerous other recording technologies have come to embody her disembodiment. The holographic model is the penultimate mediation/mediatisation of Moss who has become a subject of and to the screen. The future does seem holographic, at least for Moss who recently announced that she will be teaming up again with Baillie Walsh, holograph designer for the McQueen show, for the first 3D fashion film. The short can be found here (best if you have 3D glasses I suppose):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cou04-vOZx8
Technology aside, something else I find striking about this gothic media object is the extent to which we might see Kate Moss as a gothic heroine, a modern day Marie Antoinette. Are fashion models for the likes of McQueen, and D&G, the contemporary equivalent of the eighteenth-century gothic heroines? (Have we traded run-away heroines for heroin runways?). What specific connections can be made between Marie and Moss? Both women are royalty in their respective ways, and both share a troubled reputation and representation – in political pamphlets (Marie Antoinette) and the tabloids (Moss). Catherine Spooner writes, in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), “the shocking spectacle of the ‘almost naked’ queen is rather a rhetorical object of pity that provokes the desire to conceal in order to protect” (32). The wounded Moss returns to the fashion world, albeit holographically, as if to remain at a safe distance. Furthermore, throughout the performance the billowing chiffon oftentimes conceals Moss’ face, making it quite literally a dance of both veiling and unveiling, echoing the same dynamic of her appearance and disappearance, a dynamic that also shrouds Burke’s rhetoric on the subject of Marie Antoinette. As Spooner explains, “The tension between the opposed images of ‘bad’, scandalous queen and ‘good’, threatened queen invoked by contemporary discourse therefore provides a complex space of female subjectivity through which the figure of the Gothic heroine is produced” (39). Undoubtedly, this is what occurs in the holographic image of Moss: the chimerical Moss, floating above her subjects as the un/dead queen of fashion, brings together both a scandalous, coke-snorting queen and a fragile, phantasmatic queen.
So, the English queen of fashion appears luminous on a French runway ... what would Burke make of Moss’ gothic media dis/appearance?
Sources:
Botting, Fred, ed. Essays and Studies 2001: The Gothic. D.S. Brewer, 2001.
Dietrich, Joelle. “Moss shadows catwalk in Paris fashion show.” 3 March 2006. Associated Press. 14 Feb. 2007
Frankel, Susannah. “The ghost of Kate Moss looms above McQueen show.” 4 March 2006. The Independent. 4 Oct. 2010 <http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article349134.ece
Gillmor, Don. “Stop Making Sense: Designers get serious.” The Walrus. 3.9 (Nov 2006): 83-5.
Hogle, Jerrold. “The Gothic at our Turn of the Century: Our Culture of Simulation and the Return of the Body.” Essays and Studies 2001: The Gothic. D.S. Brewer, 2001. 153-179.
Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concern Technology and Other Essays. Harper & Row, 1977.
“Kate Moss.” Photograph. Alexander McQueen Fashion Show. Tribe. 14 Feb. 2007 < http://people.tribe.net/fd6bcc6a-392c-4199-b7d3-2703373b75c8/photos/e0dd12a9-eb00-4d74-babc-e570bd349fab http://people.tribe.net/fd6bcc6a-392c-4199-b7d3-2703373b75c8/photos/e0dd12a9-eb00-4d74-babc-e570bd349fab
“Kate Moss.” Video. Alexander McQueen Fashion Show. YouTube. 4 Oct. 2010 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cou04-vOZx8
Kittler, Friedrich. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Spooner, Catherine. Fashioning Gothic Bodies. Manchester UP, 2004.
Zizek, Slavoj. “How to Read Lacan: Troubles with the Real: Lacan as a Viewer of Alien.” 4. Oct. 2010 http://www.lacan.com/zizalien.htm
Elizabeth Effinger is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Western Ontario, where she specializes in Theory and 19th century literature. She has published on queer and gothic bodies within Romanticism and new media in Queer Blake (Palgrave, 2010) and Spectacular Death: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Mortality and (Un)Representability (Intellect, forthcoming). She is currently at work on her dissertation entitled “The Romantic Posthuman and Posthumanities,” which locates a new genealogy for critical posthumanism within Romantic thought. Her interests in the gothic include: the place of the gothic in critical theory and new media.
