In my first post in the “The Aesthetic Turn” series, I spoke of the part of “our experience of a media object [that] exists prior to and outside of language.” I asked whether we could use language to describe it without denaturing the experience itself, and I concluded we can’t, at least not directly. But that doesn’t mean we can’t describe it at all, and in this post, I’d like to suggest how to approach it obliquely, through metaphor and translation. (This post began as a “Digital Lightning” talk I gave as part of a series put on by the University of North Dakota’s Working Group on Digital Humanities. As I spoke, I played Casino Royale in the background.)

I’m a sucker for a good chase scene. I love the elegant excess of the parkour chase at the beginning of Casino Royale, where James Bond (Daniel Craig) pursues a criminal who careens off walls and catapults through improbably small windows.

I love the silly excess of the freeway chase in The Matrix Reloaded, where one pursuit is layered on top of another (in cars, on top of cars, and in motorcycles on top of cars). My favorite right now is the four-deep chase-within-a-chase (and dream-within-a-dream) that marks the climax of Inception.

I want to ask a question about chase scenes that is really a question about something else. In a sense, I want to force two things together in an unlikely metaphor. What do chase scenes reveal about media and translation? I mean “translation” in a broader sense than linguistic recoding, although I mean that, too. The English word translate derives from the Latin transferre, meaning “to carry across.” It implies movement. Other languages (such as Finnish and Japanese) use words that emphasize mediation and transformation, rather than movement. Both, I think, are key: movement implies transformation as signs leave one sphere to become meaningful in another.

How do media shape the phenomenon of movement-transformation? What happens when, say, a TV show travels from one geographic or technological space to another? Few questions are more fundamental in media studies, and few have been asked as often, although we tend not to phrase questions in terms of translation. In the era of “new media” (whatever we mean by that), we frequently speak in terms of remediation: what happens when we view newer media through the habits of thought instilled by older media? This question has grown ever more urgent as media converge. What happens when a fan remixes a show, which then goes through YouTube, and then through a link on Facebook, before it gets to us? I want to shift the focus, however, from the media platforms and technologies to the “through,” the movement-transformation.

What happens at the point of “through”? Is there a logic to “through-ness”? Can we see everything that is happening, or are things hidden from sight? Here is my initial answer: In the process of transformation, a gap opens up between a sign before its movement and after. The original sign and its “translation”—the sign we substitute for it—do not evoke the same things. They might evoke similar things; in fact, translation as we have traditionally understood it—a form of rewriting in a different language—is premised on that appearance of equivalence. But we need to pay attention to the gap, which is a place of doubt and ambiguity. It is also a place where we can observe an experience of a media object that is prior to language. Still, our observation is oblique: how does it feel to enter this place of doubt? Does this ambiguity provoke unease? Something else?

So what does this have to do with chase scenes? I’m forcing a metaphor here, which is to say, I’m transposing a sign—chase scenes—from one context (movies) to another (translation and media). (Not for nothing does metaphor derive from the Greek μεταφέρω, meaning “to carry across.”) Through that metaphor, I’m opening a gap we experience (in part) by asking, why this weird juxtaposition? My purpose is to provoke a reaction—an “aha!” would be great, but a “what the hell” will do perfectly fine, too. The point is to use translation and metaphor to turn our attention away from the object (the chase scenes, the media platforms, the texts) toward our experience of the object. The move is admittedly quite “meta” (μετα?), but it is also potentially quite valuable, too.

This is the second post in Antenna’s new series The Aesthetic Turn, which examines questions of cultural studies and media aesthetics. If you missed guest editor Kyle Conway’s inaugural post last month, you can read it here. Look out for regular posts in the series (most) every other Wednesday into the new year.

A recent Wired post suggests that the page-flip user interface – which replaces scrolling navigation with rigid paginated screens – is a popular feature that set tablet reading apps like iBooks, Flipboard, and Instapaper apart from their competitors. iBooks in particular, features a dramatic page-flip animation with a curled edge and translucent text rendered on the underside of pages as they are turned – a feature recently adapted by Instapaper. This is all pretty fancy stuff that designers admit is arbitrary to un-paginated web content. According to Wired, by mimicking the familiar book, the page-flip beats its scrolling counterparts by being more intuitive and “classy.”

Bolter and Grusin would agree that this is part of the formal logic of remediation – newer media are fashioned in the image and expectations of older media (and vice versa). They would also agree that the page-flip interface’s intuitiveness and classiness fulfills the double logic of remediation – that of immediacy and hypermediacy. So, looking like a book erases the need for scroll bars or buttons, creating a more immediate user experience; yet the book interface adds an audiovisual layer that makes us hyper aware of our mediated experience.

And let’s not forget a more fundamental and related reason why we like the page-flip interface – it’s cooler. Is Apple’s iBooks cooler than Amazon’s Kindle in the same way that Instagram is cooler than your mom’s digital photos? Did Apple include a sepia-toned filter to its iPad reader for the same reason Instagram built its brand around their polaroid-esque “1977” filter? Before you stop scrolling/flipping because you think you’ve heard this story before – I’m not blaming it all on nostalgia, as postmodern theorists have done since Frederic Jameson in 1984. Well, actually I am, but with the important caveat that not all nostalgias are created equal.

Drawing on Susan Sontag, this New Yorker post suggests that Instagram taps a mode of nostalgia specific to photography. Photographs freeze moments in time and thus remind us of the inexorable passing of time and transience of human experience. By instantly aging images through its filters, Instagram simulates nostalgic desire and esteem for moments that are arguably still in progress. Instagram’s recent $1 billion sale to Facebook is another testament to Jameson’s observation that this nostalgia of the present is endemic to contemporary consumer capitalism.

Perhaps the page-flip user interface taps a mode of nostalgia specific to our relationship to knowledge – nostalgia for a way of knowing that is bounded and finite. Let’s consider two popular tablet news aggregators, Flipboard and Pulse. Flipboard curates news in a magazine format that paginates articles and collections of articles. When I’m on Flipboard, I always know which page I’m on relative to the total pages of each article and each collection. Pulse presents my news through vertical scrolling through collections, horizontal scrolling between articles, and vertical scrolling within articles. When I’m on Pulse, I feel like I’m on an information treadmill, always moving from one story to the next. However artificial or arbitrary, Flipboard gives me a sense of orientation relative my reading accomplishments and goals. Pulse on the other hand, replaces accomplishment with an insatiable appetite for evermore stories, anecdotes, images, statistics. Jodi Dean relates this compulsive pattern of media consumption to psychoanalytic theories in her conception of  “circuits of drive.”

The book encapsulates and now simulates a mode of knowing this is a far cry from the distracted and unbounded media consumption habits of the networked present. Before Jameson – the story goes – readers of books lived in an era where stories held a sense of discreteness, finitude, and authority. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that in a networked age riddled with mediated circuits of drive that lead everywhere and nowhere, critics and moviegoers are ineluctably drawn to a film like Hugo. In a pivotal scene that crystallizes the film’s central metaphor, Hugo explains his fascination with machines – the thing that automatons, clocks, and 20th century cities have in common is that they are built to fulfill a purpose. By fixing his beloved automaton, Hugo unlocks the secret left by his father, and fulfills his destiny of social integration.

This is arguably a fantasy of compensation inspired by the same cybernetic zeitgeist that has ushered in a world/view of networked complexity and posthuman agnosticism. Instead of financial networks of systemic risk and digital networks of emergent outcomes, perhaps we are all nostalgic for Newton’s good old world machine – a bounded entity designed for predetermined outcomes. Like Hugo and his automaton, perhaps we too long to find our missing pieces, to fix our broken parts, and to fulfill the purpose we were designed for. Purpose and especially destiny can only exist in bounded systems with finite outcomes, kind of like a machine, a clock, or a book. Can a book really tell us about our changing attitudes towards knowledge? Can a page-flip user interface really shed light on ways of being in the world? The answers to these questions are not governed by destiny, but by your emergent responses.