Richard Wright (1998), Montage - Transformation - Allegory: A Study of Digital Imaging in Dialectical Film Making, unpublished PhD thesis, London Guildhall University. In 'Montage-Transformation-Allegory', Richard Wright argues that transformation operates in the spirit of montage, inducing new shock effects for the digital age (1998). This is informed by Walter Benjamin's concept of allegory in which new understandings emerge through the bringing together of historical fragments. Montage is a machine-like juxtaposition of fragments that can be forced out of the historical continuum. In this way, the objects that constitute 'the material world could be rearranged out of their conventional, found or "natural" order so that the forces which shaped them would become visible, manifest and accessible to the senses' (Wright, 1999). In dialectical allegory, objects are brought together through montage to disrupt the continuity of ideological conceptions. Rather than see digital imaging in terms of smooth and normalised transitions and imperatives, Wright argues for the possibility of a digital aesthetic that amplifies the dialectical method. Indeed, the 'tendencies of the montage method are not opposed by any unifying tendencies of the transformation but by its particular dynamics of dispersion' (Wright, 1999). In A Dialectical Approach to Film Form written in 1929, 'Eisenstein explains that conflict in the world and in art takes many forms and it is these conflicts that account for the constantly dynamic state of forces that drive change and new ideas' (Wright, 1999). Reality, for Eisenstein, is not described directly, but must be reconstructed to reveal the hidden structure that otherwise remains obscured by ideological preconceptions. Although this can be seen as replacing one ideology with another, it should be remembered that in 1930s Russia, under Stalin, montage methods were a diversion from Socialist Realism - not representing the real world in a naturalistic manner but in materialist terms. -- example: His screensaver ' The Bank of Time' [http://www.thebankoftime.com/] does just this. 'The Bank of Time' is a screensaver that is informed by the vagaries of the stock market, and the financial sector in general. Unlike much work in this area that uses financial markets or makes ironic reference to the business sector, The Bank of Time is a subtle and allegorical comment on idleness and growth. Wright notes how the germinating plant is a recurring metaphor in financial and investment advertising, as well as in Baroque imagery depicting the 'transience of earthly things'. It alludes to allegorical imagery in the best tradition of Benjamin in drawing together historical fragments through montage techniques to shock people into a new recognitions and understandings of the material world. In allegory, anything may mean anything else. Wright's background in computer animation is of relevance here, with animation as the task bringing inanimate matter to life - in this case the sequence is constructed by downloading images of a growing plant frame by frame from the internet in a slowed-down parallel operation. No longer twenty-five frames per second but the user's idle time is directly proportional to the rate of growth of the plant on their desktop - from seedling to fully grown plant through to its decay reflecting the allegorical reference it evokes. On the web, the user has access to the Idleness Growth Tables to see how their performance, or the lack of it, compares to other users. Wright sees this paradoxically as idle time turned into an investment, or growth through idleness, and claims there is an economy of lost time. The underlying politics and poetics of this, reflects the slumps and peaks of the economy in general. One might think of the culture economy too, and the Arts Council of England's (seed) funding that supported the work as part of this matrix. Wright comments on the inability of the art world to take stock of the information society and how idle most curators are in promoting and selecting this kind of work. Networked technologies have enhanced the effectiveness of global capitalism, enabling it to become more flexible, adaptable, faster, efficient and pervasive. Culture, too, has become integrated in the process of the creation of capital, with cultural regeneration as the clearest example of capital's project of renewal - through ideology, reflecting these processes as natural as the growth of plants. The art world reflects these trends. Is idleness a suitable response to this tendency? This further alludes to a more militant refusal to work associated with the autonomists. The Bank of Time doesn't exactly call for a refusal to work but does promote idleness as a suitable creative act. In the Bank of Time, the more idle the user the faster the plant grows and the higher up the performance table they rise. Although clearly not refusing to make art as such, Wright says: 'soon everyone will be working hard to waste as much time as possible'. Whether this is already the case in much arts practice under current conditions remains in contention. Bill Seaman (1999), Recombinant Poetics: Emergent Meaning as Examined and Explored Within a Specific Generative Virtual Environment, phd thesis. Using the term 'recombinatory poetics,' Bill Seaman's research employed a techno-poetic mechanism to generate emergent meanings - a poetics extended by computer-based technologies (1999). In a sense, Turing's 'Universal machine' is transformed into his 'The World Generator/The Engine of Desire'. He describes this techno-poetic mechanism as an abstract machine that not is merely text-based, but one that might suffer from associated problems of universalism (associated with Chomsky's work on generative grammar). Drawing upon Derrida's work, Seaman asks whether this constitutes a new form of writing or a 'new form of evocative exchange which cannot be defined in terms of past linguistic discourse?' (1999). -- 2