Cormac Deane | Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire, Ireland (original) (raw)

Papers by Cormac Deane

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2015

Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which ... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize processes and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.

New Formations

This article pays attention to the media channels through which different modes of power flow, an... more This article pays attention to the media channels through which different modes of power flow, and specifically to how they sound. The soundscapes of real and fictional control rooms provide a way of understanding the connection between automation, decision-making and politics. The types of sounds that accompany control rooms screens map onto alternative, at times contradictory, interpretations of the ontological status of computation and data visualisations. As a result, both biopolitical and sovereign modes of power seem to coexist, with human control room operators making decisions whose actual significance is difficult to measure. The control room is therefore a key manifestation of a general contemporary anxiety about dematerialisation, virtualisation and information overload, and about the political problems that they entail.

Marketing Theory

We present a psychoanalytic reading of 332 images of bacteria in advertising for antibacterial pr... more We present a psychoanalytic reading of 332 images of bacteria in advertising for antibacterial products and in public service announcements since 1848. We identify four dominant and recurring tropes that bring bacteria into the symbolic realm: cuteness, overpopulation, the lower classes and deviant sex. As a first stage of our analysis, we propose that bacteria are symptoms of a capitalist socio-economic order. Bacteria are repressed fears and fantasies about purity, gender, race, community, pollution, class and sexual promiscuity which are tacitly leveraged by antibacterial brands. We then ask why these fears and fantasies take the form of the bacterial. We trace a movement from the psychoanalytical concept of the symptom to the sinthome. If symptoms can be read as a repressed, extrinsic ideology that can/must be revealed, the sinthome is a fantasy that, when brought to light, does not dissolve, because it structures reality intrinsically. We indicate an emerging body of psychoanal...

The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media, 2016

Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film, 2016

The star of The Handmaid's Tale, Elisabeth Moss, is a Scientologist. Is it important to know this?

After ten years of Transformers movies, it's time to reflect on all that has changed. From Chaos ... more After ten years of Transformers movies, it's time to reflect on all that has changed. From Chaos Cinema to Video Essays, and from Desktop Movies to Crowd-Sourced Content, we need a whole new language to think about contemporary media.

Nature Nanotechnology, 2017

Public perceptions of nanotechnology are shaped by sound in surprising ways. Our analysis of the ... more Public perceptions of nanotechnology are shaped by sound in surprising ways. Our analysis of the audiovisual techniques employed by nanotechnology stakeholders shows that well-chosen sounds can help to win public trust, create value and convey the weird reality of objects on the nanoscale.

This article conducts an examination of the connections between the fantasy user interfaces (FUIs... more This article conducts an examination of the connections between the fantasy user interfaces (FUIs) of computers in the television shows 24 and CSI and the sounds that they emit. The resulting sense of computational activity produces what might be characterized as a digital subjectivity. The significance of this kind of subjectivity is considered in relation to: the historical context of contemporary television/cinema (‘TVIII’); the apparently cybernetic tendencies of complex screen environments; and the political ramifications of a logic of computation. The competing claims of the sound and the image to be the prior, determining factor are discussed. It becomes clear that the distinction between what constitutes information and what constitutes noise (audio and non-informational) is a key problematic both within the screen narratives in question and in the broader media environment that they occupy.

This paper identifies the relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of digital technocu... more This paper identifies the relation between aesthetics and politics in the age of digital technoculture, especially as it is manifest in the 'terrorism genre' in film and television of the last 25 years. From Homeland and 24 to the Bourne trilogy, Skyfall and Patriot Games, techno-thrillers about counterterrorism and its enemies display the permanent political crisis of the state as a crisis of techno-aesthetic form. The control room in counterterrorism mode, a place from which drones and other remote operations are conducted, is the key manifestation of this crisis. The striking preponderance of screens embedded within screens in these narratives is a techno-aesthetic manifestation of the spatial and logical paradoxes of emergency legislation and, more broadly, of the strange location of political subjectivity in the matrix of technoculture.

New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2010

Two extracts from Christian Metz's final book, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (L'én... more Two extracts from Christian Metz's final book, Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film (L'énonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du film), are presented in a single pdf file: 1. Secondary Screens, or Squaring the Rectangle; 2. Film (s) Within Film. This is the first time they have been published in English.

The embedded screen is a key feature of contemporary film and television texts featuring ‘terrori... more The embedded screen is a key feature of contemporary film and television texts featuring ‘terrorism’. Recurring chronotopes in these narratives, such as the control room and television news programmes, present us with frames within frames that have two complementary functions. First, embedded frames enact circular modes of logic, such as tautology and autology, which are crucial in the creation of a coherent notion of ‘terrorism’. Second, embedded frames are the screen-manifestation of the legal concept of the state of exception, which must be invoked so that the forces of law and order can take extraordinary measures in the face of a ‘terrorist’ threat. The rhetoric of interiority/exteriority that is enunciated by the frame within a frame reflects and constitutes sovereignty’s reliance on the notion of the state of exception in order to establish and consolidate itself. Just as, following Giorgio Agamben and others, the state of exception is at the heart of the power of the state, so is the embedded frame at the heart of the depiction of power in contemporary narratives. This analysis is based primarily on the television series '24' and on films based on novels by Tom Clancy.

Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize pro- cesses and phenomena whic... more Advertisements for high-technology products and services visualize pro- cesses and phenomena which are unvisualizable, such as globalization, networks, and information. We turn our attention specifically to the case of nanotechnology advertisements, using an approach that combines visual and sonic culture. Just as phenomena such as complexity and networks have become established in everyday discourse, nanotechnology seizes the social imaginary by establishing its own aesthetic conventions. Elaborating Raymond Williams’ concept of structures of feeling, we show that in visualizing nanotechnology, its stakeholders employ spaces, verbs, and objects of feeling. These favorable nanotechnology structures of feeling are woven into the social imaginary, recursively producing the reality they describe.

Introduction to two extracts (available in separate file) from Cormac Deane's translation of Chri... more Introduction to two extracts (available in separate file) from Cormac Deane's translation of Christian Metz’s final book, 'Impersonal Enunciation, or the Place of Film', (L’énonciation impersonnelle, ou le site du film), published in 1991. The book-length translation will come out with Columbia University Press in 2015. In this introduction, Deane argues that, despite the book’s marginalized status in both Anglo-American and French film studies, it can nonetheless be used to address theoretical issues relevant to the twenty-first century: multimedia, interactivity, networks, subjectivity, (machine) intelligence, ideology and the status of the apparatus.

First of a series of columns that I have started writing for The Village Magazine

On race and racism in Tintin, and Spielberg's strange way of handling them.

The 2017 film 'Ghost in the Shell' lacks an emotional centre. As such, it is typical of the super... more The 2017 film 'Ghost in the Shell' lacks an emotional centre. As such, it is typical of the superhero-, multi-film franchise model that the big Hollywood studios are pursuing as TV breathes down their necks.

Donald Trump is Climate Change (1 of 2)

Donald Trump is Climate Change (2 of 2)