Mapping the Narrative in a Digital Album Cover
Authors: Tsarouhis Patti 
Published: October 2020

When Ray Winstone’s character in the film ‘Nil by Mouth’, uses an album cover as a portable work surface to prepare drugs, what is invariably being enunciated is a narrative of generational identity. The object status of the vinyl record with its sleeves, notes, and protective sheath, appends a broader trajectory of the ‘record collection’, ‘stereo’, ‘speakers and dials’. The series of operations performed upon these raw materials whether, collecting, listening to, trading or buying second hand, creates a unique cultural form, a series of unordered items/events, which Lev Manovich terms a ‘narrative’. A narrative can best be described as a series of developments within otherwise unrelated elements, which forms and/or sustains an identity for the group of people interacting with them. The culture of listening to commodified music, with its necessary hardware (vinyl/CD/cassette), collectively works to map methods of listening and modes of behaviour, which enable an album’s ritualistic consumption. However, the various digital translations of the traditional album cover, including the ‘album icon’, the ‘desktop’, the ‘playlist’, invert the narrative created by the traditional vinyl assemblage by their nature as discrete data. The paragraphs which follow examine the effects of New Media’s ‘transmissive’ rather than reflective aesthetics, producing alternate maps of the physical, aural, and cultural experience of data and narrative. The digital album ‘icon’, the transmissible ‘sign’ or ‘trace’ of a material object, functions as a complication to Manovich’s New Media narrative/database binary.

The construction of database and narrative as natural enemies within New Media discourse highlighted by Manovich, is problematic when dealing with systems of operation characterised by their mutability. The traditional relationship between the album cover and its musical content, its remediation in digital format, serve to reveal that the two are not so mutually exclusive. Within popular discourse, it is acknowledged that the database – repositories of discrete information – is foregrounded by the digital apparatus, whereas the analogue apparatus is seen to foreground narrative – the processes performed upon information, from generation, to packaging, to transmission.

The packaging, the physical dimensions and collectable attributes of the record, constructed a ritualistic narrative specific to the vinyl. The public face of the vinyl album in record stores and personal collections was a transitory stage, prolonging the inevitable ‘unwrapping’ in private. The promise of something untouched and unexplored beyond the removal of the ‘nylon stockings’ of the vinyl sleeve; the enticement to come into physical contact with the textured ridges of the LP in order to move the play head to a desired point from which the experience will begin, articulates the seductive, and culturally entrenched power of the narrative database, and its private use. While the vinyl object constructed a narrative able to oscillate between public and private modes, the encoding of sound into mp3 or wma, by its presence as naked data is both direct and indirect, and foreshadows the general role of technology universally – to standardise action into repetitive occurrences – producing residues of a direct action. The digital music file has already been “unwrapped”; it is a conversion, a singularity, the “animal” which enters into things, signalling a change of state (Deleuze and Guattari 27).

What is being altered and reassembled in the translation from analogue to digital is not only the format of the data, but the surrounding assemblage/phylum. While the LP’s assemblage was a promise of unexplored territory, the less determinate assemblage encasing the digital file, if anything, presents a colonised terrain. It makes explicit the external party (the programmer/conversion software) having proceeded before you. Whether through a ‘peer-to-peer’ or ‘pay-per-download’ service, the digital file becomes the single object accessible to countless, subjects. It is not one, but a multitude of unaccountable ‘unwrappers’.

The map, or indexed data, is the catalyst to narrative activity. Its elements are arranged attuned to a cultural sensitivity, in order for its contents to be understood and to be acted upon. Understanding the material album cover as a specific type of cartography – physically shepherding the consumer towards real material locations when examining its digital counterpart in the “icon”, reveals the fragmentary effects of the digital apparatus. The album icon does not merely signal the malleability of subject and object and the rupture of former equations of reality with embodied experience. More importantly, the presence of the icon whether on a webpage, iPod, or playlist, heralds an alteration in the relationship of sound to visuals, and the nature of navigation itself.

Albums contained in main street stores and shopping complexes, like the music they reflect, carry – not entirely pejorative – connotations of being “tame”, “tidy” and “bland” (Shaughnessy 5). The search for more experimental music entails a step outside the consumerist domain of the mainstream record industry to “comb the hidden networks of labels releasing new and experimental music”. Labels such as Warp and Beggars Banquet signify their position on the fringe of the economy through album covers “fizzing with … incoherence, weirdness, techno-fetishism, anti-commercialism, anti-design, and visual promiscuity”. The material album cover provides a perceptive map with which to explore a territory.

Conversely, the presence of the ‘album icon’ on a website, or alongside a playlist causes the navigator to enter a territory to explore its map. For if a ‘narrative’ is to be understood in Munster’s terms as a set of processes performed upon information, then New Media have the ability to foreground the ‘database’ over ‘narrative’ accounts for its transmissive, rather than reflective aesthetics. Unlike an album cover in its material form – be it vinyl or CD, the icon doesn’t bind a material space – it doesn’t ‘cover’ anything. It is not an object to be transmitted. It is a transmission. It occupies the intermediate ground between narrative and data. The icon, like hypertext, becomes interface, a series of movements through and across unfolding surfaces. It is a performative zone, acting to shepherd site visitors to a review of the album in question, or towards options for attaining its material presence via customised payment. The album icon fragments the conceived assemblage, not only in its foregoing of materiality (which the material presence of the computer would contradict), but through altered methods of navigation; ‘transmitted’ rather than ‘reflective’ topographies of image to genre are aesthetically understood. When every site online becomes equivalent to the next by means of its ‘addressability’ – where everything can be located by an address, and a discrete value, what was formerly the visual equivalent to the music, is now a smooth plateau of perception (Vanhanen).

As stated by Novak, technology, or rather human interaction with technology has evolved to the point where the materials transmitted are signs of subjects (1997). The material presence of an LP/CD acted as a set of coordinates with which to circumnavigate and ‘become’ a popular identity. With the digital music file, the ‘seducer’ becomes the ‘seduced’; the package that once contained the LP or CD becomes externalised upon the physical space, its subsequent “wrapping”/“unwrapping” or consumption, contingent upon the ambience created by a particular soundtrack. When consumers enter a territory to explore a map, the binary between narrative and database is blurred.

References

Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari. Kafka. Trans. Cochran, T. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986.
Novak, M. “Transmitting Architecture.” In Kroker, Digital Delirium. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1997.
Munster, A. “Compression and Intensification of Visual Information in Flash Aesthetics.” Fine Art Forum 24 May 2004 http://www.fineartforum.org/Backissues/Vol_17/faf_v17_n10/reviews/munster.html>.
Shaughnessy, A. “Anti-Design, Playfulness and Techno-Futurism.” Introduction to Intro, Radical Album Cover Art Sampler 3. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2003. 5.
Vanhanen, J. “Loving the Ghost in the Machine.” C-Theory 24 May 2002. http://www.ctheory.net/text_asp?pick=312>.

Citation reference for this article

MLA Style
Tsarouhis, Patti. "Mapping the Narrative in a Digital Album Cover." M/C Journal 9.1 (2006). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/08-tsarouhis.php>.
APA Style
Tsarouhis, P. (Mar. 2006) "Mapping the Narrative in a Digital Album Cover," M/C Journal, 9(1). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0603/08-tsarouhis.php>.