Special Effects Environments: from the Renaissance to
the Present

 (Synopsis of the book in progress, 1995)
 

     Inside the mall at Caesar's World in Las Vegas,
beneath a false Tiepolo sky, an animatronic statue of
Bacchus performs every night at eleven, wriggling and
laughing in his cups, to lure visitors back into the
casino. Afterward, they enter by what feels like a back
door, as if into a high-stakes poker game. It is a
special-effects journey where desire is managed on
behalf of a greater good-- investment.
     A timpany of coins hits the pan in slot machines
near every door, to remind the player that perhaps here
the odds are loose. The phrase "Loose Slots" is repeated
on signs along the Strip, a pun on "getting lucky,"
(slots as in "sluts"), to go with the flyers handed out
by escort services, reminding visitors that "it's" legal
here. According to legend, the number of prostitutes
within each casino used to be assigned, as if by
oddsmakers who also knew the precise ratio of flesh to
gambling.
    The script appears to be calculated down to the last
dime. Don't expect to win, but expect a good ride.
Visitors gamble away, on average, over three hundred
dollars per capita every weekend. Most will accept that
without argument. The potential to break loose is always
there, even though the odds favor the house. You pay for
the experience.
    That is the unique narrative of the special effects
environment, whether in a casino or a movie house. The
simulated setting ultimately must promise more than it
can deliver, because it is only managed desire. You do
not actually meet a dinosaur, or come home after the
weekend with your wallet bulging. But you expect the
spectacle to compensate for the fee.
    The spectacle can be transparently artificial, the
paint showing, the lights too red. That only announces
the craft involved; also that this is a safe risk,
transparently artificial because it is well built. The
illusion may suggest the hazardous, but very much under
control. It looks a bit phony because someone is
obviously at the switch. That person is obsessively
trustworthy, like a guard dog or a security system. He
may pretend to slip; the audience groans. But he is
pretending to make a mistake, to show you the craft, and
to remind you that your future is protected.
     Magic acts over the centuries have operated
essentially in the same way. The controlling person
behaves in a very formal way, to announce stability. A
very well-dressed magician saws a tempting but docile
woman in half. She waves to reassure the audience. Then
something goes wrong. The illusion may shock the viewer
for an instant, as if gravity were about to be defied,
but afterward, the house lights go up very quickly, as a
reminder that the ordinary is still there.
     The illusion may not be entirely believable, but
the audience can see where the investment goes, why
money is needed to pay the freight. The thrill may be
fake, but it has to look extremely well planned, like an
investment in motion.
     Even faith can be an investment in motion. During
the reign of Pope Leo X (1475-1521), Rome was a
pilgrim's special effect, investment on behalf of
salvation, to support the new indulgences that Tetzel
and others were expected to raise in the Holy Roman
Empire. Michelangelo's paintings in the Cistine Chapel
were a journey in seven tableaux, through Creation and
back to the ordinary, delivered as materially, as
lavishly, and therefore as artificially (as bodily) as
possible. The viewer was expected to appreciate this
materialism, as a reminder that the pope was the only
material agent to God. et be gratified by the allegory
itself, that the desire for salvation cannot be achieved
except for a price.
    The glamour of special effects has to seem wasteful,
but managed, as if the world is so intact, there is
money to spare. Even the super-natural world can look
too landscaped, to remind the viewer that this too is
under human control.
    Afterward, as you leave the space, the world outside
might look as drab as the back of a garage. The ordinary
takes over. The viewer is momentarily disoriented. The
clock shows that only five minutes went by. The sky
looks drab. But the contrast should be charming: it was
worth it. The blush of the ride is felt, until the sea
legs return. Nothing is changed, as promised.
     Similarly, the CD-ROM game Myst opens with
elaborate promises about hidden crimes in a fantasy
gothic setting. The photo of a weathered book is
animated, and opens to the first page. A battered
landscape emerges, as if someone had crawled under a
fence, and taken a first peek. The viewer is invited to
choose a screen from many hidden trigger points. One
layer replaces another, all severely encoded. It is
journey that is not taken, with choices that are pre-
assigned, even if the assortment involves hundreds of
screens. The investment is announced in the graphics,
very vivid, a form of armchair tourism on behalf of
massive global investments in digital electronics. But
the facts are even simpler. This is merely another
appendage to the computer, probably no more salvation
than papal indulgences or slot machines. And yet the
palimpsest of images peeling one into the other takes on
a monumentality that is hypnotic, even to people who
spend their work day in front of a computer screen. An
odd catholicity emerges, of the sort Macluhan described
generations ago. We belong to a global space that is
immaterial; however, the crude economics suggest that we
will own very little of it in the end. We are channeling
ultimately into a phone system that will turn
practically every desk job into a special effects
environment like a CD-ROM.
     Special Effects are a complicated aesthetics based
on the myth that the audience has power over the
machine. It is a discourse on perception, on semantic
memory, spatial memory, the politics of public space,
and the myths of community. But these environments are
designed to resist discourse, on behalf of
entertainment. We need to find an apparatus to attack
this cyber fantasy as powerfully as possible, to find a
more politically engaged strategy for the special
effects arts.
    That involves looking backward. The many
vocabularies of special effects since the Renaissance
can help us locate cycles that have already completed.
They also serve as points of origin that need
rediscovery, and above all, provide enough distance to
locate a modernity in these illusions. We need to
reinvent a psychological modernism by way of special
effects, as theater, architecture, literature, what
Virginia Woolf called "moments of being," a stream of
consciousness into the erasures of memory that computer
civilization implies. We need to build a program that
operates randomly, a screen that the viewer invents
rather than chooses, as unpredictable as the future we
are entering. Otherwise, we only have a better telephone
answering device, owned by an electronic warlord system
that is larger than governments, certainly larger than
any special effect, no matter how good the graphics are.
    This is an emerging civilization, not simply a new
generation of household appliances and adventure movies.
We are still treating it as expanded television or
enlarged theme parks and smarter video games. That will
not be nearly enough.
    How to proceed:
    Chain of production: The steps by which these
effects are made have to be examined very carefully. The
final text is not enough. By then, the possibilities
have diminished, not grown.
    Perception: The "virtual" effect is always relative.
The vanishing point never stands still. In other words,
no gimmick will very likely equal the impact of the
Lumiere films on audiences who had never seen film
before-- ducking under their seats when the trains
appeared.
    Perception has to be studied very carefully, medium
by medium, generation by generation, to get a fix on how
these vocabularies speak, much less sing. That means
perception of space, of memory; the allusions to other
media.
     Narrative and Audience: Story and character are
firmly altered whenever special effects enter.
Therefore, the role of audience has to be studied
scrupulously as if one were studying the pulse of a
patient when the bed is moved.
     New Forms of Evidence: The epistemes and the
documents may be somewhat unlikely at times, because the
records for these effects, even while they are made, can
be highly scattered, particularly if you are not simply
trying to record the final texts.
   There will be four chronological blocs:
     A. Primarily the contemporary special effects
masters (1977 onward), who will always will at the head
of every chapter. In other words, the book will always
operate on rewind, from a central problem in the
present, followed by sources that are informative, and
then with a final review.
     B. Film Era (1919-77)
     C. Nineteenth Century Consumerism (1835-1918)
     D. Renaissance And Baroque Models (far more than in
the eighteenth century)
     There is also a fifth bloc: the digitalized culture
that is emerging. That is really a problem, because it
is changing so fast, I can easily be dated even in the
months it takes for the book to go to print. This
material will depend on the interviews, and will be
woven into the text. I will not try to toss in computer
technology, but rather stay inside the film and video
industries, with examples from computers that seem
appropriate (i.e. DC-ROM). I want the book to end as
close to the present as possible, but not get old within
a year. It has to be fixed, in a sense, covering certain
years that remain essential, no matter what changes take
place.
 
   With these strategies in mind, here is a sense of
what blocs a book on "the history of simulation" should
include:
       First Part: The Simulated Environment: The theme
to this chapter would be, as in the preface above,
managed disaster, managed risk. I would concentrate on
the imaginary versions of public space, trying to define
how the sum relates to its market, and what is its chain
of production.

    1) The Set: I would begin with background on how
movie sets as special effects have operated, along with
interviews with designers, and a sense of how they fit
into the chain of production (what controls, what range
of choice). Then I will go back theatrical machines
during the Renaissance, the role of audience in masque,
commedia del'Arte, centuries later in vaudeville, in
opera, in melodrama, to trace some of the sources that
are evident in Melies work, in German set design, in
American examples.
   2) Copies of Cities: Beginning with the cinematic
evocations of the Lower East Side (in numerous films and
sets), and with obvious examples like Blade Runner,
Disneyland, I discuss the political and narrative uses
of copies of cities, then review the literature on
consumer arcades, on the theatrical use of piazzas, on
panoramas; along with comparisons with cinematography,
photography. Obviously, this will also weave in material
on special effects cities in numerous films and theme
parks.
    3) False Weather: The landscaping of a set, and then
the elements of landscape architecture, of botanical
gardens, of beaches under glass in malls; the world
displayed behind glass as a special effect (note, clear
glass as an element of display fits chronologically,
beginning in the Renaissance)
   4) Amusement Centers: an unescapable subject. I will
probably discuss the scripting of the space.
    Second Part: Out of Scale: Simulation of the
Imaginary Interior:
    This chapter reverses the traditions of
representation associated with three-point perspective.
Instead, it concentrates on the Renaissance tradition of
illusionism. Again, I will start with an example set in
the present, a film that particularly identifies false
body forms, and out of scale interiors. There are so
many to choose from, probably a neo-noir fantasy of some
sort. A lot depends on how the interviews with
specialists go. I hope I can meet James Cameron, for
example.
    (Miniatures, Dioramas; trompe l'oeil; toys that led
to cinema in the nineteenth century, and toys that led
to virtual systems; also the use of simulation in
aerospace: collage (unlikely materials to suggest the
natural image);
     Vanitas (momento mori in the image; in all
"virtual" systems, there is a sense of death, or decay,
of the "vanity" of replacing nature by hand)
     Invasion of Self (Body Snatchers to Dream Stealers)
     Body Mutilation and Body Enhancement
     Part Three:
     The Impossible Journey
    1) The collapse of Time and Space: topologies about
time travel that are built; attempts to build models of
the universe (interviews at Cal Tech); simultaneity as a
special effect (the more elaborate uses of intercutting,
jump cutting, morphing).
    2) The Vehicle (This would involve interviews with
Syd Mead; and with specialists on transportation design.
    3) Armchair Tourism: Using the Indiana Jones series
as a jumping off point, I review the layouts used for
exotic illustration from the mid-nineteenth century on,
how journalism invented a form of transparent other,
both solid and invisible; and which versions were, in
fact, used by Hollywood.
    4) Expanded Animation (new uses for animated
graphics, from theme park rides to business programs on
computer)
    Finally, public space and private space seem to
collapse. And yet, the illusion serves its ideological
purpose, to displace, distract, and fetishize. However,
the subtleties have to given their due. After all, forms
as seemingly odious as this have emerged before, and
shaped a vocabulary that is compelling, though at the
same time, manipulative. Special Effects has now come of
age, as the lingua franca of the global corporate
computerized economy.
   5) The fantasies associated with the fiber-optic
highway; and what will very likely be the result. Again,
I will examine the markets, and the chain of production,
then compare it to the narrative arc, the journey of the
audience.
 

Norman M. Klein

The Monitor and the Labyrinth

(1995)

    We begin with the texture of the printed card -- an
essay printed on cards, clearly a reminder of the
systems that Babbage used for his calculators in the
1830's, the machines that presaged the computer itself.
A catalog of essay cards is woven as if on a loom.
    This also resembles a card catalog in a library, the
nineteenth century print form of database. So the design
for this catalog is a kind of miniature theater; it
restages the moment when the digital first appeared
inside the print era.
     It also restages the somewhat randomized, and
highly abbreviated essay form one finds on the WEB and
in CD-Roms, a kind of illustrated magazine format, with
prose haikus running 150 words at a time, only enough to
fill a screen.
     These cards also can be seen as an allegory for a
broader problem, about the database1 as a migrating
epistemology, across the arts. But mostly how does the
digital on a monitor capture the agonizing double we
associate, say, with a Dostoyevsky novel? Does the
digital format capture the aching paradox that we
associate with the modern Russian novel, or the
Expressionist painting?
     Or does the zero/one format of the digital database
merely inhibit these paradoxes-- those we associate with
the fine arts. Paradox in the sense of "irony," as in
Romantic irony; or Baudelaire's modernity; or the self-
reflexive devices with Cubist painting, Symbolist
poetry, Wagnerian music, Expressionist theater, noir
cinema.
    For the moment, 1998, I am quite convinced that the
computer, with meager exceptions, does not operate
paradoxically in that sense-- not yet. I am prepared to
assume that the moment is early. Perhaps the digital is
stalled in adolescence, trapped by its own special
genius for copying other forms. Or trapped by the
cybernetics of marketing, particularly for children; and
dominated by the entertainment industries (film, video,
advertising, software design, games).
     Norbert Wiener, as early as 1950, prophesied such a
trap, what he called the "threatening new Fascism
dependant on the machine a governer."2 Add to that the
extraordinary disengagement of the digital from the body
and from the body politic (except among right wing
political movements, like those linked with radio talk
show host Rush Limbaugh). I would hate to call that
paradoxical in the sense I mean.
    Instead, we start from ground zero, or what Barthes
called "degree zero," when describing the utterly
stripped-bare language in Robbe-Grillet novels of the
fifties. Then we decide to locate where the paradox is
most fertile; and assume (in that utopian Enlightenment
sense I suppose), that knowledge will convert into new
art or architecture.
     First issue: The digital form of alienation is much
more ergonomic than the industrial was-- a soothing
repression. On the computer, we are fundamentally
pleased when we feel disengaged, even from our own
bodies, from our sense of class, of politics, and
time/space. Something in the merger of entertainment
culture and the digital business machine has made pain
itself almost impossible to express. Political questions
and emotional problems seem beside the point.
     Second Issue: In the mall culture and computer
culture at large, the private has been separated from
the intimate-- far more than in the nineteenth century
industrial city, for example. Some of this separation is
simply part of a perverse new etiquette. For example, TV
broadcasting and Washington politics are busily engaged
in studying the penis of the president of the United
States. His private parts belong to the public; his
intimacy is never discussed.
      Our media makes surveillance and monitoring part
of "fun" culture, conciliatory. But essentially it is an
inversion. I can see city walls going back in the
Ringstrasse, literally a restoration of the old rings--
as malls, themed spaces, enclaved urban villages,
consumer marketing of public life. But like the original
Baroque city walls, it will restrict on behalf of a less
mobile class structure. And visitors, even the poor,
will pay hard cash simply to peek.
     Third Issue: Even unconscious memory is now a piece
of public life. I regularly ask my students: Do you
think you were brought up in great measure by
television? They answer yes, absolutely. Then I ask how
the older models of the unconscious can possibly fit in
a system of intimate memory that is so televised, so
public?  For the most part, any model for intimate
memory that resembles Freud's topology looks antique,
like a three storey house in the Ringstrasse, too
architectonic, not enough about databases and delete
functions. Repression has gone digital.
     In short, repression is charming. It is easy
listening. And in a strange sense, we are leaving the
twentieth century from both ends. We are even returning
to warlord systems and feudal arrangements, where fealty
is monitored digitally. Industrial is old. Balkanized
feudalism is new.
     Fourth Issue: This form of repression is soothing,
like a remote control for a TV set. In the meantime,
however, very little politics of resistance manages to
interrupt this state of digital bliss. In a sense we
cannot bite the hand that sells us the software, much
less the global economy that so cheerfully colonizes
what used to be identified as the unconscious. It is a
theater of politics, a deceptively pleasant labyrinth, a
happy imprisonment.
  Let us imagine the sensation inside a digitized space,
a mall space, a casino space, as skin to a labyrinth-- a
pleasant labyrinth, a happy imprisonment. It is a
scripted space, like a theme park, or even a Baroque
city plan. But no matter how cute,  no matter how much a
diabetic shock it may generate, its "story" is always
power. Let me explain through excerpt, a click forward:
    Traditionally, the labyrinth is designed as a
trackless path of blind alleys. But it is very pleasant
to be trapped inside. Rest stops are provided, a
fountain or a bench to break the monotony. Then, slowly,
the blindness clears, like moral discoveries on a
pilgrim's progress. In stages the path reveals its
secrets. You walk through a moral allegory; its secrets
lead to revelation.
     That was essentially the role of labyrinths built
for the church during the middle ages, and for the
nobility of Europe as late as the eighteenth century--
hedges, drawings, sculpture, broken circles for walking.
It was condensed pilgrimage, with very straightforward
rules, to make the passage enlightening. Labyrinths were
intellectual challenges, not simply theatrical
immersions. Often, the hedges were barely ankle high, or
not at all, easy to map with eye. Some labyrinths were
mosaics to trace with your feet on the floor; or a
unicursal rutted turf for walking. The "sojourner" would
know beforehand whether there were single or multiple
entrances, or how the helixes might operate; also what
form of revelation could be achieved, usually to justify
the social order as a moral good. Therefore, knowing the
map helped you walk faster, but the map was only a
guide. It was not designed to be the mystery itself. One
had to navigate to find mystery, in what the Germans
called bildung: the journey as discovery, in this case a
very compact journey, more like walking through a text.
Like a story you could slip in your pocket, the
labyrinth was a miniature of a vast pilgrimage. It was a
kit, like a pocket reliquary or a bag of relics for
armchair tourists.
    This precise architectural tradition of labyrinth is
what the Renaissance inherited; and was, in turn, passed
down to us through Romantic imagery, in cinema, consumer
planning, computer games. The labyrinth was an
interactive journey with subplots, but all of it could
be managed in a single room, on a single sheet of paper,
or on less than an acre. Over the centuries, these
garden and heraldic labyrinths inspired metaphors in
literature, usually in one of two variations, either as
one person's mazy passage, or as a crowd descending upon
a single spot from the four corners of the kingdom.
Shelley described Venice as "a peopled labyrinth of
walls."3
    Recently, labyrinths have gathered new meaning as
trackless branching systems on the Internet. Most often
I see references to Borges' library as labyrinth, "an
indefinite or infinite number of hexagonal galleries."
It sounds very heady, but more often these labyrinth
chats resemble faith healing by numbers. The
mystification troubles me. We do not need holistic
nonsense about the Web in 1997. Why mystify what is
little more than fancy corporate telephonics at the
moment? 1998 is still a dangerously nascent stage for
the Internet, while a trillion dollar nest of super-
companies sets up shop. Net surfing is not revelation,
even when you download the mystic geometry of the seven
pointed Greek labyrinth; or compare search engines to
the labyrinth walks of medieval ecstatics.
     Instead, I prefer relying on architectural models.
They remind me that, while labyrinths "taught"
revelation, they also taught political humility, how to
bow obediently when noblemen passed. For example, in the
garden labyrinth at Versailles (1661), paths through the
maze were pre-assigned according to social rank. For the
nobility, the allegory led to gloire, a military myth
that honored feudal rank. For the middle class, a
separate route taught Honesty, to know your place on
behalf of the greater order.
     Now-- another click-- toward labyrinths as scripted
spaces:
     Labyrinth design over the past five hundred years
profoundly resembles what is built in media today-- in
bizarre mutation of course, in malls, casinos, on film,
in games. But these Renaissance and Baroque labyrinths
must be studied as warnings, as well. We should force
ourselves to stay alert to what is at stake. To repeat:
the cute maze may seem as innocent as a childish action
figure, but it packs a wallop nonetheless. It helps
police malls, and keep players at slot machines.
Labyrinths are rigidly coded, not dissolving at all.
They have a sharp point, and we're essentially on the
end of it. What's more, we are supposed to enjoy being
stuck like a pig. The sensation is worth the price.
    It is user-friendly alienation. Don't be lonely.
Flick that remote. Roll that mouse. Lose yourself.
"Labyrinth" relies on the player feeling cheerfully
disoriented. I say cheerfully, because the confusion is
intended by the designer. They understand that the
player wants to submit to the loss of control, if it
feels safe enough.
    Then click on to "loss of control:"
    The player or the citizen must feel momentarily as
if he or she is authoring the script. However, for this
authoring to feel "magical", the script must be at the
right temperature, like air conditioning, not too much,
just enough to make the player feel comfortable-- awed,
faintly lost, but enchanted. Too much visible
surveillance is good for some spaces, bad for others.
Avoid tensions about social class, keep the mood
genteel, the "happiest place on earth."
    Then one has a series of subsets to upload, like
broadcast news, political campaigns, advertising, urban
planning. The conversation begins to feel too much like
a condensed book, rather than an illustrated magazine.
So we click to possible conclusions:
     Labyrinths are like arm wrestling with a parent--
or Jacob wrestling with the angel while God watched;
carefully controlled, not open-ended really. It is
almost a theological replay of childhood. The parent is
the program itself, the apparatus that gives you the
magic. So no matter how cute the script-- a hug from
Goofy, a wink from Barney-- it is fundamentally a
picaresque about a godlike apparatus, a mountain god
that cannot be violated (always stays encrypted). The
apparatus helps you author your story. It gives you
enough free will to feel like Don Quixote (a cheerful
psychotic break). You relinquish some power, then
pretend to subvert the windmill.
     Borges has a magnificent description of the mood
inside a labyrinth, what Manfredo Tafuri calls the
"solitude that engulfs the subject who recognizes the
relativity of his own actions." From Borges:4

    The Library is unlimited and cyclical. If an eternal
    traveler were to cross it in any direction, after
    centuries he would see that the same volumes were
    repeated in the same disorder (which, thus repeated,
    would be an order: The Order) My solitude is
gladdened
    by this elegant hope.
     Labyrinths are a profoundly corrupt game. In fact,
I would like to see more labyrinth games about the
corruption itself. After all, every art form has its
self-reflexive devices: irony; direct address;
defamiliarization. But the computer, oddly enough,
survives mostly as a highly formalized tool of
entertainment, and also the slickest telephone Jules
Verne could have imagined. The entire format cries out
for a good hatchet across the forehead. How about a game
that actually bankrupts you? How about a blade-runner
format that actually brings replicants into your
neighborhood? How about a game called Job Search where
you can hire your own assassins to murder people who
have better resumes? As Tristram Tzara said eighty years
ago, the world needs an operation. He didn't mean it
literally. The Swiss Dada groups were not involved much
in political action certainly. Tzara was, after all,
Sami Rosenstock, teenager from Roumania, hiding from the
army during World War I by staying in Switzerland.
    Speaking culturally at least, let us make more
omelets out of this nonsense. Build really leaky
labyrinths. Because under all the disembodied marvels,
all the fluff, lay our actual future, as real as a car
hurtling downhill without brakes. We call the
manufacturer to complain. No Brakes, they ask? The easy-
listening voice reminds us that our radio and cd player
are digital, state of the art. They won't fail us. The
wall is at least ten minutes away. There's bound to be
new software to fix brakes by then. Look on the bright
side.

1. I should mention that Lev Manovich both teaches and
lectures extensively on the aesthetics and paradoxes of the
database; therefore, part of this argument owes much to our
conversations.

2. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York:
Houghton Mifflin, Company, 1950), p. 214 (taken from an
article in 1948, in Le Monde, pp. 206-209).

3. Percy Bysche Shelley, "Lines Written Amongst the Euganean
Hills," (1818) I.115.

4. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," in Labyrinths:
Selected Stories and Other Writings (New York: New
Directions, 1962), p. 51.