Reverse engineering: dismantling and customizing for the new global media ecology.

In engineering, reverse engineering identifies the system's components and their interrelationships. It then creates representations of the system at another level of abstraction. (1) Reverse engineering dismantles technologies like cars or computer codes to understand how their parts articulate. It cracks codes and invents new forms, always emphasizing building something new out of the structures of the old. The ability to customize tools for new uses, a feature of reverse engineering, can function as a radical formulation method to collage technologies and machines into new interfaces and spaces.

In the new mobile matrices of public media where technologies, platforms, and distribution systems proliferate and thus problematize our worn-out concepts of the public sphere (media intervention and independent media), reverse engineering offers a way to conceptualize a radical media insurgency in these new media ecologies. I do not use the term reverse engineering in its classic engineering sense, where the disassembly implies the production of a better product within the same set of technical restraints. Rather, I deploy this term as a more radicalized model and an unruly metaphor that remixes this engineering idea with emerging media practices as a way to shift discussion away from an exclusive emphasis on images and representation.

In revamping reverse engineering and, in effect, reengineering it for public media, I hope to explore a move toward considering technology, infrastructure, policy, and exhibition not as static structures but as material constructs that can be taken apart and remixed. In this way, I use the term reverse engineering to move beyond the idea of collage and image piracy into a sense of remaking and recombining the machinery of media. Rather than deconstruction of images, I am interested in the reconstruction of the material base of public media practices. These reconstructions map new media microgeographies. There is, in this conceptualization, no one public media practice just as there is no one public sphere. Instead, it is a pluralized landscape of endlessly constructed, often provisional, possibilities where technologies, infrastructures, policies, and exhibitions are constantly combined in different ways.

A theory and practice of reverse engineering needs to be situated within the transnational matrix of racialized and gendered empire. (2) We must reverse-engineer the amnesia and anaesthesia of transnational capital and the Bush administration with polyvocality, plural temporalities and geographies, and an incessant, insistent solidarity. This tactic requires a historiography of contiguities, pluralities, and polyphony that resembles a fugue. For example, digital media artist Philip Mallory Jones creates digital paintings in which each component represents a different historical period of racialized history, always transnational in connecting the disparate locations of the African diaspora, from Africa to the Caribbean to the United States. His work constructs contiguities with pluralized geographic spaces to reverse-engineer the separations that figure the history of diaspora as fragmentation.

Digital artist and engineer Natalie Jeremijenko's ongoing, online open-source encyclopedia of labor conditions and manufacturing processes for contemporary consumer products provides an example of reverse engineering. Her Web project "How Stuff Is Made" combines different technologies--from historical analysis, economics, labor, science, photography, and Wikipedia--to trace the production origins back onto the product, revealing the hidden transnational and labor processes of everyday products. (3) For instance, the site shows how nearly all American flags are manufactured in Chinese sweatshops.

VIETNAM AND IRAQ

One historical example of reverse engineering comes from the war in Vietnam. Vietnamese recycled the metal from downed U.S. warplanes and made booby traps to fight U.S. ground troops, they refashioned the tires of U.S. warplanes into rubber sandals for tropical warfare (predating Merrells and Tevas), and the North Vietnamese recovered the footage of napalm bombing from crashed U.S. B-52s and pirated it as evidence of war atrocities in documentary films. (4) The films were smuggled out of Vietnam and then circulated in the international antiwar movement.

At the core of video image processing, image and signal manipulation, and experimental video, film, and digital media is the reverse engineering of tools. For example, artists and toolmakers like Bill Etra, David Jones, and Steina and Woody Vasulka built new machines and tools using schematics to create an algorithmic mathematical art in a collaborative process that predates Photoshop and Combustion by twenty-five years. At the Experimental Television Center in Owego, New York, Peer Bode, Ralph Hocking, and Nam June Paik modified low-cost video systems in the 1970s beyond their industrial design, altering and interfacing off the shelf machines, in effect combining two different tools of domesticity to make something new. (5) Machinery was taken apart, recombined, layered, and collaged together to create new spaces and images.

Reverse engineering needs to be added to the tactics of pirating, pranks, collage, culture jamming, and copyleft as strategies for resistance and intervention into transnational capital and empire for several reasons. (6) In the context of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Joint Vision statement 2020 that calls for full spectrum dominance of the space, sea, land, air, and information, advocates for radical democracy must engage in full spectrum resistance. (7) Since 1991, during the first Bush regime, the DoD, under the influence of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and Paul Wolfowitz, has pushed for the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), a post-cold war conversion from boots on the ground to a total and complete digitalization of warfare through control and deployment of all new technologies. They contend reality is nonlinear, dynamic, and asymmetrical. RMA forges enormous, complex linkages between the hardware and software industries and the government. (8) The USA Patriot Act, passed in October 2001 with little debate, broadly "expands surveillance" and constitutes "one of the most significant threats to civil liberties, privacy and democracy," according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. (9) It authorizes packet-sniffing technologies like Carnivore and eliminates the need for a warrant.

In a completely different context, as pointed out in a published report on the state of independent media by Andrew Blau, Deep Focus: A Report on the Future of Independent Media (2005), the public media field needs to jettison its old ways of thinking, leftover from the 1970s, that position independent media as completely oppositional to corporate media. In the new ecology of public media, the borders between different domains of media practice are fluid. The report explains that "the commercial/noncommercial distinction no longer serves the purpose it once might have" because the "traditional relationship between the non commercial and commercial media systems is changing." (10) [Ed. note: For an in-depth report on Deep Focus se Afterimage 33.1 (July/August, 2005)] In this new media ecology, cheap becomes the new normal, and platforms, forms, technologies, and interfaces multiply The popular "Bush in 30 Seconds" spots from moveon.org exemplify this, as do the viral marketing techniques of antiwar flash animation distributed via e-mail.

Computer games, as Deep Focus argues, are "being embraced as a platform for critique and education," suggesting that public media needs to move into a more diversified media environment. (11) Americans now spend more money on video games than movie tickets. Gaming is a $7 billion industry. The military is now using commercial war games for advancing major strategic and scenario planning, for distributed innovation, and for training. The DoD is now leveraging the enormous investments of IBM, Sony, and Microsoft in gaming by deploying the advanced technological capacities of Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation. A major strategic capability of the DoD is simulation technology; however, the gaming industry's capabilities have surpassed that of the military. The military has even developed its own gaming site for recruitment purposes, www.americasarmy.com. As one article describing the military's economic and efficiency interest in war games noted, "video games made better soldiers and sailors faster, safer and cheaper." (12)

After September 11, 2001, Osama bin Laden's was the most circulated face on the Internet. Gamers inserted his image into various war games so that his image could be shot at and disseminated. Many sites featured games where one could use the mouse to kill bin Laden and other notorious figures from the Middle East, militarizing the mouse and racializing the home computer screen with the national phantasmatic. (13)

A plethora of reverse engineering-inspired antiwar games have emerged on sites like newsgaming.com, watercoolergames.com, seriousgames.org, and opensorcery.net. They combine interfaces and technologies--not only images and sounds--to create interactive antiwar collaborative environments. One of the most famous is Velvet Strike, an antiwar modification to Counter-Strike, a multiplayer game where players join terrorists or counter-terrorists.

Thus, as these examples suggest, the contours of this new ecology for public media require reverse engineering our conceptual models of oppositional media as well as the technologies themselves. We must move from considering collage only in the realm of visuality and aurality into theorizing and actualizing collage as layering technologies, networks, and public spaces. (14)

In this reverse engineering framework, which functions as both model and metaphor, public media moves from images to interface, from fixity to fluidity and mutability, from object to modularity, from disembodied to embodied. The machinery that secretly and without debate organized empire has retreated into utter invisibility. Life in empire proceeds as usual on a collective dose of Ambien, ignoring death without interruption in one monolithic, somnambulant voice. (15)

This newly reconfigured, war-without-end, authoritarian regime requires thinking not only about images and discoursive formations, but also about technologies, technological formations, and public space as endlessly mobile polyvocalities and pluralities. For example, the U.S. military has learned from Abu Ghraib: nearly every soldier in Iraq has access to e-mail and cell phones, and these broad and largely uncensored real-time communications during war are unprecedented in history. Senior commanding officers at bases in Iraq have Internet kill switches to enforce control over information flows in these networks. (16)

In these larger contexts, reverse engineering requires interrupting the network, breaking the machine, and redistributing all the parts.

MALAYSIA AND GENEVA

The copyright industries, according to the International Intellectual Property Alliance, now constitute the largest U.S. export. Some analysts claim copyright export now exceeds export of military products. (17) However, Full Spectrum Dominance and RMA have demonstrated how the copyright industries and the military are intertwined and integrated with each other. According to Bruce Berkowitz in his pro-military book, The New Face of War (2003), 90 percent of military communications travel over commercial links. (18) He points out that decentralized digital communications have shifted war into network warfare where there is no front, but instead, these systems rely on zapping, swarming, and maneuver warfare to create disorder. (19) A palm pilot, for example, was commercially produced for special agents in Iraq and Afghanistan to provide global positioning system mapping, instant translation, scenario planning, tactics, and real-time communication. If captured or hit, agents were instructed to crush the palm pilot with their boots or guns.

Perhaps a salient example signaling this merger is the Institute for Creative Technologies at the University of Southern California, bankrolled by the DoD and the gaming company Electronic Arts (EA). It is dedicated to merging military applications and simulation technologies with the entertainment industry. (20) The transnational media corporations (TMCs), like the military, operate for full spectrum dominance of all distribution channels. As one writer in the South Asian digital collective Sarai has argued, Interpol has now advanced the somewhat bizarre connection that intellectual property piracy finances global terrorism through digital video disc (DVD) sales of Bollywood films, Disney children's movies, and Windows software. Interpol links the global circuitry of the pirated information commodity with asymmetrical netwar. (21)

Many political economists have documented how post-Hollywood TMCs have transformed into intellectual property clearinghouses, commanding monopoly power over copyright, licensing, and trademarks. The Motion Picture Association (MPA), representing the seven major studios affiliated with the TMCs, uses the rating system of motion pictures as a front for its real activity, which is the worldwide policing of copyright protections for the industry. (22)

In February 2005, Downhill Battle, a political group supporting participatory cultural practices and a fairer music industry, organized one hundred pirate screenings of the landmark documentary on the civil rights movement, Eyes on the Prize (1987, 1990). The fourteen part series was produced by Henry Hampton and a team of filmmakers and aired in two parts in 1987 and 1990 for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). Eyes on the Prize is one of the most widely disseminated and used documentaries in American history, now found in many university, school, and public libraries. (23)

Originally, the rights for footage used in the film, taken from a myriad of sources including television and amateur films, were secured for public television broadcast only. However, in the last ten years rights clearance costs have escalated; it is more and more difficult to secure worldwide rights across different platforms. Some documentary filmmakers engaged with the controversy estimated it would cost over half a million dollars to secure rights clearance, a small amount of money for a TMC but a sum beyond the reach of Blackside, Inc., the original nonprofit producing company. As a result, the VHS copies in many libraries are deteriorating, but it is no longer possible to buy a copy of Eyes on the Prize. (24) For black history month, Downhill Battle used the screenings of Eyes on the Prize to bring public attention to this crisis of the production of historical amnesia, another example of racialized reverse engineering in the area of film exhibition.

It is equally important to triangulate intellectual property and the control over image and branding with the restructuring of these industries around technologies old and new. Since 1989, the TMCs have been equally interested in controlling the various platforms for media, emerging not only as global in scope of operations, but also transindustrial and transtechnological at every level. (25) Products and images shift, change, remix, modularize, and revise to move across many different platforms to maximize penetration of different markets and spaces across the globe. (26) Remediation of visuality is no longer a theory of textuality but an aspect of global operations asset management to maximize profit. (27)

The TMCs no longer focus on the manufacturing end of production, but on marketing, distribution, and exhibition--control of all networks and spaces of media commodity circulation. The Matrix Revolutions (2003, by Andy and Larry Wachowski), for example, was recut for Singapore to delete Neo and Trinity's sex scene, and Keanu Reeves, who is biracial, was remade into an Asian star expert at Kung Fu, conquering computers, code, and Hollywood. The dispersed, decentralized, interactive, open source, collaborative, amateur, and asymmetrical modalities of digital culture are anathema to the TMCs. They have responded by not only lobbying to extend copyright protections in the U.S. through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, but by becoming both vertically and horizontally integrated to control all the technologies and means of distribution.

In December 2004, the MPA initiated Operation Eradicate in Malaysia and eleven other Asian countries in an attempt to not only crack down on copyright piracy of DVDs and compact discs, but also to raid and then dismantle copying machinery and factories. Malaysia is currently the world's largest exporter of pirate entertainment software, enacting an estimated loss to the TMCs of over $188.4 million. (28)

The MPA's action should be contextualized within Malaysia's aggressive bid to enter the global information economy. The Malaysian government launched the Multimedia Super Corridor in 1996 in an attempt to convert rubber and oil plantations south of Kuala Lumpur into the Southeast Asian silicon valley with the lure of a ten-year tax holiday, a high-tech digital infrastructure, and new cyberlaws for intellectual property. To date, 1,200 cyber-economy companies have opened offices or manufacturing plants there, including Dell Computers, Netscape, Intel, Lucent Technologies, Sun Microsystems, and Microsoft. Still, the digital divide remains with 90 percent of elementary schools lacking Internet connections and at least 25 percent of East Malaysia lacking electricity. (29)

Piracy is a rampant, socially acceptable, and above-ground activity throughout Malaysia. In Johor Bahru, a short cab ride across the straits from copyright compliant Singapore, three-story indoor shopping malls feature small businesses specializing in pirated software, Bollywood films, American music, American and Hong Kong action pictures, and computer games. Piracy functions as the fulcrum point in a contradiction between the need of the Malaysian government to insure the West that it obeys copyright, while promoting piracy as a way to create political stability in a multiethnic Muslim area through full employment. Piracy also operates as a way to resist the globalization of the TMCs by earning money from Disney products rather than paying money to Disney.

Within this global, concentrated media environment, reverse engineering means expanding access to tools and information to collage a more diverse media ecology rather than a monoculture. A small triumph in media infrastructure occurred in the U.S. in June 2004 when the Third Circuit Court ruled against massive deregulation of broadcasting in Prometheus Radio Project v. FCC. Prometheus Radio promotes microradio, low-power FM stations that broadcast to geographic areas of just a handful of miles, and initiates community builds through radio barnraisings. (30) In a larger international movement, the World Summit on the Information Society gathered in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2003 to create a Declaration of Principles among progressive international non-governmental organizations. The declaration advocates the interdependence and interrelationship between human rights; sustainable development; and universal, equitable, and affordable access to information and communication technology. It demands respecting cultural and linguistic diversity and protecting the public domain by strengthening archives, libraries, museums, and collections, and by recognizing the needs of the least developed nations. It shifts the language of the digital divide to concepts of digital opportunity. (31)

INDIA AND CAMBODIA

Reverse engineering uses tools to disassemble a program or a machine. It can also employ three-dimensional computer-aided design (CAD) programs to make images of parts to translate the gap between the physical and digital world. Reverse engineering functions as an interstitial practice, in constant movement, always disassembling in order to map the interrelationships between parts, only to reassemble in new ways. However, in the global information economy, these concepts are globally embodied in real labor relations. CAD/CAM (computer-aided manufacturing) reverse engineering, software development, and code have been outsourced to India, where over one million people are employed in a $12.8 billion export industry that takes advantage of low wages in a country with a significant number of educated English speakers. (32)

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Interventionist collage operates as a machine to reverse-engineer historical explanation and archives. Collage, then, resides not only in visuality and aurality, but also in reimagining tools, machines, technologies of power, and space. (33) Reverse engineering suggests moving off the single screen to many screens, interfaces, and provisional exhibition zones. It means combining machines with each other to reconfigure the interface and space.

For example, Chris Csikszentmihalyi at Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a mobile imaging system he dubbed the Afghan Explorer, an autonomous robot for remote cruising and imaging of rural and urban geopolitical hotspots to gather news for the public in the face of Pentagon press controls of war zones. The machine was imaginary, looking like a child's remote control toy of a Mars landing vehicle. The toy was reverse-engineered, rebuilt as a faux remote imaging device for Americans to secure blacked out news and images. It functioned as a translation machine between the physical and digital worlds of invisible war, between the trauma of the real war and the manufactured symbolic order of mass media representations. (34)

Subaltern historiography from South Asia reorients and reframes these concepts of disassembling multiple parts of this new media ecology by locating this process within historical context, explanation, and significance. This historiographic model has reverse-engineered Indian nationalism by expanding the archive to include the voices and practices of the subaltern and their struggle. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that the historical is "contradictory, plural and heterogeneous," even as schemes attempt to "naturalize and domesticate this heterogeneity." He looks for a historical model that would provide translation across cultural and other systems "so that the world may once again be imagined as radically heterogeneous." (35)

Critical historiography has figured temporal disjuncture and plurality as central to a reconceptualization of history, the archive, and the releasing of suppressed contradiction. In place of the inertia of continuity and progression, a concept of contiguity is advanced. Contiguity is spatial rather than temporal. It reconfigures historical practice through juxtapositions, contradictions, and layerings to create new futures, along with new meanings. The archive--conceived of all that is past, recovered, and lost--is then always open and recombinant, evolving and not fixed, a process and not a product.

This new collaged archive combats the anaesthesia and amnesia of authoritarian transnational capital with synaesthesia and polyphony. Collective and political public memory is generated through networked models of hybrid and multiple temporalities and solidarities. Histories and stories, images and machines, are always retold and remade. As Ranajit Guha argues, they move from the speaker to the listener, from the state to the everyday, from the interface to the embodied, from the virtuoso to the amateur. He wrote, "the world would open up with all of its pasts." (36)

Reverse engineering requires a collaborative, networked model that pays as much attention to collaging machines, differences, tools, exhibition spaces, and solidarities as it does to deconstructing images. A critically engaged public media practice must construct, in both theory and practice, new imaginary zones through a multiplicity of screens to create new historical arguments, solidarities, and agencies. Ethnographer David MacDougall has argued for a collaborative, dialogic, and polyphonic process of cultural production. By collaging different voices and practices, a participatory compound work is created. This compound work, which MacDougall defines as a "crossing of cultural persepectives," creates a liminal zone open to contingency, embodiment, and performativity. It generates new common knowledge derived from interconnections rather than separations. (37)

This collaborative reverse engineering of tools, spaces, differences, and histories demonstrates that collage is mutable, live, embodied, ephemeral, spatialized, and performative. The Florida Moving Image Archive in Miami operates the Magical movie bus tours. (38) The archive rents a bus, works with a local South Florida historian, and then screens amateur film, newsreels, and industrials on DVD as the bus travels through different neighborhoods in Miami. The home movies of Cuban neighborhoods post-revolution provide a different temporal zone to the contemporary neighborhood of third-generation inhabitants. The archival film is cut and mixed as the bus travels through different neighborhoods. Participants on the bus can share the microphone and tell their own stories about the neighborhoods, often triggered by the footage.

Art Jones, a disk jockey, video jockey, and a founding member of the Not Channel Zero Video Collective in the early 1990s, is doing live remixes of image and sound in a performance entitled "Dismantling Empire: Live!" (2005-). The piece is a live audio/visual performance and DJ/VJ battle, incorporating multiple video streams and music performed in real-time with multiple computers. The performance appropriates and remixes audio and visual elements from mainstream news, and commercial, entertainment, and alternative media to critique how images validate and promote the idea of a benign "new American empire." Hi-tech combat, embedded war journalism, prisoner torture, and post-9/11 security and surveillance form the source material for the live remix. Jones then dismantles empire by reverse-engineering the separation of discourses, practices, and technologies into an embodied knowledge, gestating a new public space. Through computers, music, and multiple screens, the performance speaks to the networked nature of war and technology by reconfiguring new articulated networks.

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S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, a 2002 documentary by Cambodian filmmaker Rithy Panh, reverse-engineers the trauma of the genocide of 1.7 million Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge. His project goes to the heart of a polyvocal historiography and a collage of temporalities. Through testimonies and reenactments of the experience in Tuol Seng with survivors and guards, he shows how the authoritarian Khmer Rouge reduced murder and genocide to the ordinary, exposing the horror of detail and dispassion. The survivors and victims confront each other through historical embodiment. Another project of reconstruction by reverse engineering and collage is the Yale Cambodian Genocide Project. It functions as an Internet portal of 22,000 biographic records, 6,000 artifacts and documents, and 5,000 images of victims killed in Tuol Seng--material dispersed, lost, or hidden in Cambodia.

THE WORLD

By necessity, a politics of collaborative reverse engineering requires the generation of imaginary spaces. These provisional zones must mobilize reciprocal relations, and endlessly open texts and imaginative geographies. Reverse engineering in the context of media activism translates between the physical and the virtual, the embodied and the imagined.

Collaborative reverse engineering constitutes an act of refusal against empire. It opposes one temporality, one story. Instead, it opens up multiplicities and polyvocalities. It envisions that our political project entails inventing new tools for historical transformation and transnational solidarities that are resolutely against empire and war.

Soviet filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein reminds us why this work matters: "Because we are not making films for me or for you or for any one person, but for us all." (39) By customizing tools and spaces as well as images and sounds, reverse engineering demands that all of us, together, across our differences, undertake timeless work for change. A fearless, courageous, and exuberant anti-Empire politic demands the endless rewiring and infinite reconfigurations of political reverse engineering.

PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN is professor of cinema and photography at Ithaca College, in Ithaca, New York. She is author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995) and States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000) and co-editor of Mining the Home Movie (2006). She is also co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.

NOTES

1. For a formal definition see www.informatik.uni-stuttgart.de/iste/ps/reengineering/terminology.

2. See Zillah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West (London: Zed Books, 2004).

3. See www.howstuffismade.org.

4. Patricia M. Pelley, Postcolonial Vietnam: New Histories of the National Past (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002) and Karen Gottshang Turner [Phan Thanh Hao], Even Women Must Fight: Memories of War from North Vietnam (New York: Wiley, 1999).

5. See www.experimentaltvcenter.org/history/index.html.

6. For discussion of the hacker aesthetic and anti-copyright movement, see Kembrew McLeod, Freedom of Expression[R]: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of Creativity (New York: Doubleday, 2005); Negativland, Two Relationships to a Cultural Public Domain (Sacramento: Seeland Media, 2005); and McKenzie Wark, A Hacker Manifesto (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

7. See www.dtic.mil/jv2020.

8. Chris Hables Gray, "Perpetual Revolution in Military Affairs, International Security and Information," Bombs and Bandwidth: The Emerging Relationship Between Information Technology and Security, Robert Latham, ed. (New York: New Press, 2003) and Michael Ignatieff, Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (New York: Dicador, 2001).

9. See www.eff.org.

10. Andrew Blau, Deep Focus: A Report on the Future of Independent Media (San Francisco: National Alliance of Media Arts and Culture, 2005), 5.

11. Ibid., 16.

12. See J.C. Herz and Michael R. Macedonia, "Computer Games and the Military: Two Views," Defense Horizons, April 2002; www.ndu.edu.

13. Patricia R. Zimmermann, "Digital Deployments," Contemporary American Independent Film, Christine Holmlund and Justin Wyatt, eds. (New York: Routledge, 2004), 245-64.

14. For a systematic analysis of the historical contexts and aesthetics of collage, see Diane Waldman, Collage, Assemblage, and the Found Object (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992).

15. For a discussion of the amnesia and somnambulism of the war in Iraq, see Slavoj Zizek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2005).

16. Irene Wiclawski, "For Troops, Home Can Be Too Close," New York Times, March 15, 2005, 14.

17. See www.iipa.com.

18. Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century (New York: Free Press, 2003), 138.

19. Ibid., 76-90.

20. See www.ict.usc.edu.

21. Nitin Govil, "War in the Age of Pirate Reproductions," Sarai Reader 04: Crisis/Media (New Delhi: Sarai, 2004), 134-50.

22. For an extensive analysis of the new economic, legal, and policy contours of the entertainment industry in its transnational phase see Nitin Govil, Richard Maxwell, John McMurria, and Toby Miller, Global Hollywood (London: British Film Institute, 2001).

23. See www.downhillbattle.org.

24. Katie Dean, "Bleary Days for Eyes on the Prize," December 22, 2004, www.wired.com.

25. For analysis of multiplatforming and the digitalization of Hollywood, see Dan Harries, ed., The New Media Book (London: British Film Institute, 2002) and Aida Hozic, Hollyworld: Space, Power and Fantasy in the American Economy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002).

26. For an analysis of how the Hollywood economics have been dramatically reorganized due to globalization and digitalization, see Edward Jay Epstein, The Big Picture: Money and Power in Hollywood (New York: Random House, 2006).

27. For a book-length study on the modality of remediation as central to the digital, see Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000).

28. Don Groves, "MPA Targets Asian Pirates: Aim is to Protect Lucrative Holiday Season," Variety, December 6, 2004, www.variety.com.

29. Paramjit Singh Tyndall, "Multimedia Super Corridor: Introducing a New Economy in Malaysia," Information Technology in Asia: New Development Paradigms, Chia Siow Yue and Jamus Jerome Lim, eds. (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asia Studies, 2002), 177-94.

30. Andrew Jay Schwartzman, Cheryl A. Leanza, and Harold Feld, "The Legal Case for Diversity in Broadcast Ownership," The Future of Media: Resistance and Reform in the 21st Century, Robert McChesney, Russell Newman, and Ben Scott, eds. (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005).

31. See www.itu.int/wsis.

32. S. Srinivasan, "India's Software Outsourcing to Draw $17 B," Associated Press, February 25, 2005, www.sjgate.com.

33. Waldman, 100-53 and 284-322.

34. See Zizek, Iraq, for an analysis of how the current discourse in the war in Iraq obfuscates the trauma of the real.

35. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

36. Ranajit Guha, History at the Limit of World-History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 22.

37. For an elaboration of collaborative ethnography as a conceptual model and as a practice, see David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998).

38. See www.fmia.org.

39. Sergei M. Eisenstein, Film Form: [and] Film Sense (New York: World Publication Co., 1967), 179.

RELATED ARTICLE: a manifesto for reverse engineering: ALGORITHMS FOR RECOMBINANT HISTORIES

1 Reverse engineering identifies the system components and their interrelationships and then creates representations of the system at another level of abstraction. Reverse engineering dismantles technologies to understand how its parts articulate. It cracks codes and invents new forms, always emphasizing building something new out of the old.

2 A point of contradiction in critical historiography: narrative versus structure. Instead of the stasis and inertia of continuity, we propose contiguities. Contiguities suggest reconfiguration of both narrative and structure within a large set of coordinates that through their juxtapositions, contradictions, and layerings create new meanings and interpretations, new futures.

3 Reverse engineering and the archive it mobilizes are always open and recombinant, active rather than static, evolving not fixed. Reverse engineering opens to the future. The archive is a process and not a product. It is never finished and always revised.

4 Archival objects and tools are not static. They should not be sacralized, monumentalized, or fossilized. Artifacts--rather than archival objects--are provisional and fluid rather than fixed. They are mobilized to create a collaborative performative space for the imagination of new histories and new futures. New tools must always be produced.

5 The archival process is to name the unburied dead. This naming creates a liminal zone between that which is alive and that which is phantasmatic, ghostly, apparitional. Reverse engineering is always imbedded in transnational relationships of war and genocide, illness and famine, exploitation and oppression.

6 Witnessing and testimonial, image and artifact: together, they move and work through repetition to create memory that is collective and always forming, collaged, and reconfigured.

7 The point of the digital archive and reverse engineering is to fight the anaesthesia and amnesia of transnational capital which is ultimately authoritarian because there is no change or mutation. The digital archive fights back with synaesthesia and polyphony.

8 It is necessary to ignite and mobilize the digital archive toward collective public memory through creating networked models of hybrid and multiple temporalities.

9 Histories and stories are always retold and retold differently, moving from the speaker to the listener, from the state to the everyday, from the interface to the body, from the virtuoso to the amateur.

10 Temporality in the digital archive is plural. There is no longer one progression, but many. Contiguities become more revealing than continuities.

11 There is no divide between the digital and the analog, between the visual and the aural, between history and the future, between theory and practice, between object and subject, between the artifact and the spaces it creates. All work in a dialogic, morphing interface that deploys mobility and change to expose the contradictions of archival artifacts.

12 All images and all sounds form an archival surround. We live in the archival interface. In the digital age, we live in this archival surround. We must enter into and reactivate it in recombinant ways that entail swarm tactics, cells, provisional kidnappings of spaces for historiographic, semiotic, and political guerrilla warfare.

13 An archive is not a place. It is, rather, a theater of operations that spans the analog and digital. It stages political interventions into the archival surround and engages provisional rewirings of historical imaginaries.

14 Reverse engineering must never be unified: it is relentlessly polyversal, polyphonic, polyvocal.

15 The digital archive and reverse engineering refuses the nineteenth-century romanticism of the individual, the precious artifact, the subjective form, the linear narrative. It has as its algorithm collaboration which imagines and materializes new contiguities that produce new archives.

16 In the digital age and the archival surround, one screen in problematic and archaic. Our task: to make many screens and many spaces through recombinant archives of contiguities.

17 The digital archive is recombinant. The digital archive is contiguous. The digital archive is fluid. The digital archive is polyphonic.

18 Reverse engineering is an algorithm that is productive, changing, mobilizing. It is is not a technology but a conceptual process aimed toward action and customization. It is an interface between histories and memories, artifacts and imaginaries, the real and the phantasmatic, history and the future, technology and the body.

PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN