Welcome to the new version of CaltechAUTHORS. Login is currently restricted to library staff. If you notice any issues, please email coda@library.caltech.edu
Published January 2019 | public
Journal Article

Portable Moving Images: A Media History of Storage Formats by Ricardo Cedeño Montaña [Book Review]

Abstract

Although Ricardo Cedeño Montaña does not frame his project as such, Portable Moving Imagesis perhaps the most ambitious contribution yet to the "format theory" and "general history of compression" proposed by Jonathan Sterne in his MP3: The Meaning of a Format(Duke University Press, 2012). Portable Moving Imagesis an expansive but sometimes frustrating history of the successive "reductions" that transformed first film, then analog video, and finally digital video from complex technologies for professional media production to ubiquitous tools used by amateurs. In each process, Montaña argues, cameras and other equipment became not only smaller but also more automated; reduction in both mass and the complexity of operation facilitated widespread use of new formats. "Portable media," he writes, "compress the media factory into takeaway apparatuses that are then poured into the streets" (p. 29).

Additional Information

© 2019 Johns Hopkins University Press. Book review of: "Portable Moving Images: A Media History of Storage Formats." By Ricardo Cedeño Montaña. Berlin: De Gruyter Press, 2017. Pp. 294.

Additional details

Created:
August 19, 2023
Modified:
October 20, 2023