Immanent Terrain

Excerpt from Blueprints Essay (Revised)

2010-05-23T12:51:00.001-07:00

The challenge to proxemics, how people relate to spaces, is the possibility of the interchangeability of cities. The photographing of locations outside Jersey City creates a wider terrain that the photographer covers. As a result, the unidentified city becomes borderless. The idea of interchangeable cities was inspired by two sources: Dark City(1998) and Jean Baudrillard. In Alex Proyas's film, memory becomes a commodity by fulfilling Baudrillard's order of simulacra. Every midnight, memories are exchanged between individuals. Consequently, counterfeit, reproducibility, and simulation make the memory of the city irrelevant, as the city itself is ephemeral. The Strangers can "tune" (telepathically manipulate objects) the machine to change the structures of buildings by focusing their collective consciousness. For Baudrillard, the models and schematics that represent city planning zones no longer need the physical territories they represent. The city that the Strangers manipulate and the humans inhabit is a manifestation of an abstraction. In a later scene, the city is revealed to be an uprooted metropolis, a massive malleable construct floating in the cosmos. The cities in Metropolis (1927), Things to Come (1936), THX-1138 (1971), Logan's Run (1976), and Blade Runner (1982) are spaces densely populated with skyscrapers, subterranean, enclosed in domes, or an amalgamation of industrial, residential, and corporate spaces. However, Dark City's cityscape is provisionally solid. For Blueprints, I wanted to give the impression of the blending city boundaries by depicting images of buildings and their spaces in construction - a virtual interchangeability of cities.

by Raul Garcia

The City as a Milieu for the Virtual to Happen, Part Two: Any-Space-Whatever

2010-05-23T12:09:00.001-07:00

According to Deleuze, in classical cinema space is continuous in such a way that it supports the characters' actions. Therefore, time is imprisoned in the continuity of the story and that is why classical cinema works as a closed representational circuit in a similar way to how the represented city is closed to creative experience. Only with the emergence of the modern cinema does the status of cinematic space change: "purely optical or sound situations become established in what we might call 'any-space-whatever,' whether disconnected or emptied" (Deleuze, p. 5). In other words, the space in modern film does not stand for the continuation of the predictable film narrative; rather it stands for temporal subjectivity and, at the same time, the objectivity of the ambiguous real. In my opinion, the creative and non-representational relations with the city are grounded in the same idea of attentiveness to the virtual and the unknown. The creative openness, without any effort to subtract only what is needed (for purposes of utility), helps us come closer to a non-representational complex image of the city.

These thoughts inspire me to work on my project "Any-Space-Whatever," which is supposed to be the second part of the installation "Cinematic Journey Through Time." "Any-Space-Whatever" is a cinematic urban exploration that aims to reconsider the representational image of the city as well as to examine the exceptional temporal dimension of the cinematic medium. During the production part of the project a number of HD video studies in abandoned places all around New York City were shot. They will be screened on the four walls of a black box installation space.

The project examines the temporal dimension of cinema and the city at a few different levels, as presented below. First, the places chosen for cinematic explorations are not-yet striated spaces because they do not belong to the trajectories of everyday life and do not, in the words of Guy Debord, exist for purposes of consumption. Therefore, the first temporal aspect of the project is based on an unpredictable personal encounter with places without knowing in advance what will be found. To put it briefly, the cinematographic studies were implemented in time.

Second, according to Deleuze and Guattari, smooth space (which represents temporal becoming) does not mean homogenous space, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, non-formal space. In this connection, abandoned, wasted, post-industrial places I have visited so far do not have a stable identity; rather, they are in a transitional mode between their striated past, which is already over, and a future identity that is still unknown. The buildings are fragmented, full of holes and gaps; walls are not vertical anymore, windows are leaky. The places are dehumanized and only serve as homes for silent wind, forgotten memories and unrecognizable relics. Therefore, the second temporal aspect of the project is decided by the space's transitional position in time. All the places I have recorded are in constant change from the striated to the smooth, having the impressive traces of both periods. As Deleuze and Guattari write, "a smooth space emanated, sprang from a striated space, but not without a correlation between the two, a recapitulation of one in the other, a furtherance of one through the other." So, I would say, that records of the abandoned places are portraits of duration of their temporal smoothness.

Third, the cinematic techniques I have chosen to use for capturing the temporal existence of these places formulate another temporal component of this project. 360º panning long takes and static shots edited together with the sounds partially recorded on location move the short cinematic studies closer to the real time of the recorded places rather than the manipulative construction of personal and conventional views on the part of the cinematographer. Spontaneous editing was used only for the purpose of assembling the details together into the larger whole but not with the intention of stimulating a third meaning between the shots (ala Eisenstein). In my opinion, details from each location could be easily edited in various ways without paying attention to narrative at all. These places, following Deleuze, could be called "dehumanized landscapes of emptied spaces having absorbed characters and actions, retaining only a geographical description, an abstract inventory of them" (Deleuze p. 9).

Finally, in the end of the cinematographic study, the time-image is freeze-framed and combined with an artificial clock sound in order to inspire the viewer to rethink the relation between the real durational time of these spaces and constructed or abstract time. Summarizing the project, I would hope it could help us to reconsider the temporal, non-representational dimension of cinematic practice as well as re-think the representational image of the city.

Lukas

Tarkovsky Example of Plot Movement Becoming Time

2010-05-23T08:51:00.000-07:00

If you've read some of my other posts you know that I've been doing some research on the potential for the movement-images described by Deleuze in Cinema 1 to become time-images within respective shots and montages. I believe one example in film that accomplishes this blend is the pool sequence which occurs towards the end of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. In one shot we get sustained voiceover (which actually begins in a previous shot) while the camera slowly moves from a close-up of the main character to a tracking shot peering straight down over a shallow pool. The voice over eventually fazes out and we hear a symphonic blend of eastern meditative music fade in as the shot eventually ends with the camera making its way back to an inanimate hand half-submerged in the pool. Through this shot we are partially made privy to the true nature of “The Zone”, which is what the characters in the film (and the audience) are eager to uncover.

Here's a clip of the sequence (shot starts at :57):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfowVslQBQk&feature=related

By combining this narrative reveal with the superbly executed long take and flow of visuals, music, sounds, and dialogue, Tarkovsky achieves that ebb and flow of action-oriented plot, pure contemplation and reflection, but also formless movement through the motif of the water. In examples like this it is more of a challenge to connect action and perception with time and sensation because the two extremes naturally remove one from the other. By condensing these opposing forces into small sequences/shots a filmmaker can really induce powerful affects in the viewer.

--Jonathan Masino

Long Take Experiment Two (Movement Becoming Time)

2010-05-23T08:29:00.000-07:00

http://vimeo.com/11953460
Password is deleuze

Here is the full video of what I showed in class regarding my project attempting to depict examples of movement-images becoming time-images and vise versa. This particular experiment is a collection of 9 frames arranged next to each other in a grid. Six of the frames I chose are examples of classical movement-images that are related not only to mobility, but also to modern transportation. I wanted to use the earliest known infatuations with movement such as distinct POV shots that embodied movement of character. In these types of shots the sense of movement is easily achieved through the changing scenery as it relates to the mobile unit; however, it can also be accomplished by showing a mobile object approaching the stationary viewer as is the case in the classical example of a distant train gradually approaching a station. These would be considered forms of perception-image, which is a subset of the movement-image.

Two of the other frames I utilized are images of household chores: a laundry machine and a sink of dirty dishes being washed. While these aren’t conventional action-images they do create a feeling of movement in the sense that the viewer/character is moving towards the completion of something (i.e. the finished load of laundry and the clean sink respectively). The final frame I used is the one most closely resembling a time-image. It begins with a close-up of leaves on a tree blowing in the wind and gradually zooms out to reveal a larger environment. Later on in the shot we see a character walk through the space where we get a sense of body as it relates to environment (a-la Antonioni), which again is a form of perception-image.

With this collection of movement-image frames I tried to morph them into one whole time-image. The key for me was to transpose the affection of the images into a cumulative experience. With the movement-images we are more concerned with perception, specifically optical perception, while with the time-image we are more concerned with sensation; a more tactile and visceral response from the viewer that evokes a feeling of time and duration.

As the piece develops and we introduce more frames I think the collection of familiar images creates a “new” image when viewed together as one. By doing this we do indeed take the movement-images of everyday perception (which we can relate to the narrative of our daily lives) and mold it into a future image (or the potential and the virtual) that allows the audience to construct some sort of meaning from them (which can be a more poetic interpretation of our routine existence).

Despite some success there were several problems with this experiment. To begin, the captured sounds required an investment of more time in the mastering of the sound to artificially smooth out the soundscape. The main problem was that some of the sounds stood out more than others and even though their audio levels were lowered accordingly, they still managed to pierce through the collective orchestra of clicking and clanging by nature of their unique timbre and high familiarity (the subway sounds were difficult to assimilate). The experiment also required more diverse environments/sounds. I think I overly used cars and trains in the different frames. I should’ve thought about using footage of boats, planes, and bicycles to provide more variation in the images.

In addition, this juxtaposition of movement-images would’ve been more successful had they been in context of a greater whole or narrative. If all the frames depicted a group a characters en route to rendezvous somewhere, I think this collection of images would’ve successfully taken the audience from an image of a sensory-motor schema to an image of pure optical and sonic sensation that lends itself to reflection and contemplation, which would’ve take the audience from an action-image to a time-image.

--Jonathan Masino

Long Take Experiment One (Character Becoming Viewer)

2010-05-23T08:07:00.000-07:00

http://vimeo.com/11952416
Password is deleuze

This is an example of one of the long take experiments I conducted for my project suggesting the interchangeability between action-image and time-image in a filmic setting. In this example I attempted to achieve this feat by seamlessly altering the audience's perspective from a vicarious viewer (through the eyes of the onscreen character) to an independent viewer. Deleuze mentions in Cinema 2 that in the time-image "the character within the film becomes a viewer".(1) This long take attempted to emphasize the vacillating perceptions/contemplations between both the viewer and the character (acting as both viewer and non-viewer). The main idea was to morph this continuous shot from a time-image (e.g. disjointed images, a contemplative character/viewer, etc.) to an action-image (e.g. the character reacting to a noise, eye line matches, etc.).

I think this particular experiment accomplishes the movement from POV perception to character perception within the space affectively. We get that sensation when the camera moves from the close-up of the book to a close-up of the character’s face looking off in the distance, which is then followed by a slow motion pan to scenery that is out of focus. I was trying to move from a action-image that directly reflects the perception of the character to a time-image where we see the character perceiving the space and also contemplating. The movement back to a quasi-POV by way of the pan was designed to visually display the change of perception as a result of the contemplative character. When our minds are meandering (or in a smooth state) we are less perceptive to detail; hence, the images become out of focus (both literally and figuratively in this case).

I think we also get a good sense of action-image becoming time-image when the character’s reading session is suddenly interrupted by the off screen noise of a car skidding. This aural disturbance triggers an action in the character that demands a different viewing experience from the viewer. Furthermore, the noise is sandwiched between two moments of reflection as the character views text and images evoking nature, while at the same time experiencing nature firsthand through time, duration, and perception.

--Jonathan Masino

(1) Deleuze, Gilles Cinema 2 p.3

Achilles' Choice

2010-05-22T23:00:00.000-07:00

I guess when one is obsessed with a theme, with something that one sees as a burning problem, one's thoughts keep going in that direction. So, I've been thinking some more about questions that came up to me while reading Hansen (and that were only triggered by the text). The crucial among them was: Why actually people stop at the point of just having an idea, of an observation – why do we so often remain on the very first, the most periphery level of detecting a problem, a node, and that way too often remain considering unessential things or elements of the node? And I said, ok, sometimes we're lazy, sometimes not interested enough, and sometimes we're too much concerned with getting a status as soon as possible, so to invest ourselves harder and deeper in what we are thinking and creating. But on the other hand, what is actually behind that (besides some very conscious choices such as opportunism)? Because, laziness, for example, is usually just a manifestation, a periphery layer that is protecting something inside that is blocked, not permitted to get outside. It is never the actual cause of something "not happening".

And what is not happening in most of contemporary art is the content. One of its greatest embodiments is the phenomenon of a "project in process" or a "work in progress" that is never brought to an end. Moreover, never intended to be finished. And for the big majority of them, this has nothing to do with Deleuzian becoming. Good art deals with the world's illness, its symptoms and sometimes even heals it. Bad art is just another symptom of the illness. Such is this type of "work-in-progress" art. It reflects the illusion of the movement in our control society. By constantly changing the names of the positions or multiplying their numbers, it creates the illusion of the actual change in positions or of their qualities. Our contemporary world is abundant with constant insisting upon "activity" – people's working hard, people's moving fast, people's working fast, and moving, moving, moving. No digesting. It leaves us doomed to the catharsis through the Hollywood film, which is carefully controlled. You are not allowed to take a pause and contemplate – possibly to think of an observation, impression or emotion thoroughly, throughout your being and from that come up with a genuine movement. Because that way you will create a thing with a content – with a meaning, a story, an emotion – a "human" element, that has changed yourself and then may affect the others, therefore is able of provoking a change. But the system has never desired a change. So it keeps (and this "it" is made up of us – it becomes you and I as soon as we agree to become lazy) spreading the word that we are moving – what it is actually is doing is pushing to the extreme until it reaches its opposite – a numb and mute immobility that is not even aware of itself. All that while "it" keeps patting us on the back for our pseudo-movements… as long as there is no content, no essence – in a word, no threat. And try protesting for real. Sooner or later you'll realize you've been bleeding, but internally.

But to bleed with a purpose and full awareness is a choice. It is Achilles' choice understood as a rejection of a comfortable and commodified life not for the sake of the name, but of the ideal mediated through a piece of art only to be re-embedded in an interlocutor that will further reshape it, play with it and carry it into some other space, time and dimension. It is for the sake of being alive and involved in this world. Because, you're going to bleed out anyway.

Vladana

Additional Thoughts on Marina Abramovic

2010-05-22T18:30:00.000-07:00

Much has been written over the semester about Marina Abramovic’s exhibition at the MOMA, and all of the entries have provided us with fascinating perspectives on the experience. I visited the MOMA again recently, and was intrigued by how a shift in the crowd’s energy had a major influence on the exhibit overall. It seemed as though a reverential energy enveloped the space, unlike my initial visit. The first time I visited the exhibit, the room had a strange buzz of energy that did not quite seem to fit the performance properly. This was apparently due to some celebrities that had recently participated in the performance, and many of the people seemed to be there to try and catch a glimpse of someone famous instead of experiencing art. However, my recent visit left me with a vastly different view of the performance.

Before entering the exhibit, I had visited some of Duchamp’s pieces. There was a quote of his that appeared in our discussion of Nicholas Bourriaud’s writings that kept coming to mind. Duchamp states that, “Art is a game between all people of all periods.” This was running through my mind as I watched Abramovic’s performance, and seemed to have an influence on my overall experience. I found the relational aspects of the exhibit to be more powerful than my previous encounter. When I returned home, I read parts of Bourriaud’s Relational Aesthetics again and felt that this passage was a perfect description of my time spent at Abramovic’s exhibit:

The form of an artwork issues from a negotiation with the intelligible, which is bequeathed to us. Through it, the artist embarks upon a dialogue. The artistic practice thus resides in the invention of relations between consciousness. Each particular artwork is a proposal to live in a shared world, and the work of every artist is a bundle of relations with the world, giving rise to other relations and so on and so forth, ad infinitum. (1)

I felt as though this helped to explain why my initial experience was not as interesting as my second visit to the exhibit. I realized that I did not fully allow a dialogue to take place with the art itself. I was too caught up in other things to have a full encounter with the art, and forgot to uphold my part of the relational art experience, thus was not able to fully engage with the work.

I was pleasantly surprised by how much I appreciated the coverage of the exhibit on the MOMA’s website. It definitely serves as an extension of the exhibit itself. I found that I have watched the live stream of the performance from time to time, and am always immersed in footage. I appreciate how we are able to access the website in order to reunite with the relational experiences that we first encountered at the exhibit. It also made me wonder at which point the interactive aspects of the website were incorporated into the exhibit overall (was this first considered by Abramovic during the initial conception of the exhibit, or was it primarily designed by the MOMA?).

- Stephanie Class

(1) Bourriaud, Nicholas. Relational Aesthetics. Pg. 22.

Contemporary Independent Filmmaking

2010-05-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

Ever since my time as an undergraduate film student, I have struggled with the idea of independent filmmaking and the state of contemporary independent films. The current state of indie films came to mind again while working on my final paper, which focused on the work John Cassavetes. His status as the pioneer of American independent filmmaking still resonates with filmmakers today.

It seems as though indie filmmaking has become an aesthetic style more so than a way of creating a film. During my presentation, Sam mentioned the cinematography of indie films. The use of the hand held camera has become the ubiquitous amongst indie films these days. This was used for very specific reasons by previous influential indie filmmakers, but it should not characterize a film as independent. Although indies lack major studio funding, they often have the advantage of more creative freedom. This does not only apply to the overall content of the film, but for the crew as well. I often found on professional sets that the people who had a background in film had the most difficult time adjusting to a lack of creativity on set. However, there are instances in which, even as an intern, I was given some creativity freedom on an indie film. These creative allowances were rarely given to anyone except heads of department on studio films.

Although there is more creative freedom, there also seems to be a pre-packaged style that has developed even for indie films. I cannot completely disregard film school since I attended one, but it is obvious that film schools have a tendency to instill a pre-packaged concept of the “perfect” film in its students. This applies to both studio and indie films. Indies have developed their own format for the “perfect” film over the years. However, this format often emulates that of earlier filmmakers without taking into account the best aesthetic choices for each specific film. Just because you are an indie filmmaker, does not mean that you have to make a serious art house film with your friend’s digital camera.

I am interested to see how the future of independent filmmaking evolves in years to come. In recent years, there seems to be an emergence of interest in indie films again thanks to events such as the Sundance Film Festival. Indie films have taken on an aura of being “hip” and “artsy.” Hollywood certainly did not fail to notice this trend in the popularity of indies. Currently, indie filmmakers have more possibilities for having their films seen than ever before. The internet has provided a perfect platform to showcase their work. The plight of the indie filmmaker is as relevant today as it was in the previous decades, except for the ability to have a film seen more easily due to technological advancements. Jonas Mekas created The New American Cinema Group and subsequently the Filmmakers’ Cooperative, which still distributes films today, to help aid the underground filmmakers in the production and distribution of their films during the 1960s (the manifesto for The New American Cinema Group can be found here, and is definitely worth reading). Thanks to the advent of digital film equipment and the internet, filmmakers do not have to rely as heavily on the help of others to have their films seen and distributed, and they may not have to spend money on film stock or processing fees.

Obviously there have been a lot of generalizations made here, and my thoughts are merely my constantly evolving opinions on the subject. Many of these opinions do not apply to every indie film, of course. I think that overall my issue with indie films is that they have taken on an aesthetic style that is not always necessary or relevant for each film. They often try to emulate the stylistic choices of previous independent directors, thus somewhat disregarding the greatness the indie film’s ability to have more creative freedom than studio films.

- Stephanie Class

Digital-Genetic Feedback

2010-05-22T13:47:00.000-07:00

After reading Hansen's work on the enframing of data I found this comment by the brilliant but ethically challenged biotech pirate, Craig Venter chillingly resonant:

"It's the first self-replicating cell on the planet that's parent is a computer," says Venter, referring to the fact that his team converted a cell's genome that existed as data on a computer into a living organism.

Of course, the soundbyte is a drastic oversimplification of what's really happened here, but at the same time, as a proof of concept, it's a significant step towards the broader introduction of artificial, technologically derived forms into organic life.

This specific experiment only used genetic information that had been read, stored, and then reproduced chemically, without intervention into the functional content of the code. In other words, this experiment does not mean that we are any closer to developing artificial genes or in any deliberate way adding to existing, naturally evolved genomes. What it does represent is the entrance of genetic content into the circuit of digital reproducibility, and as holds true from Hansen, processes of manipulation potentialized by digitization.

Over the past three decades, genetic information from various sources (most notably in the 1990–2003 Human Genome Project) has been actively processed and recorded in digital databases. Nearly all of this data is still meaningless to us as the process of correlating genetic data to any form or function within an organism is supremely challenging (hence the controversy when Venter tried to patent the human genome despite having no insight into the raw data to which he was laying claim).

This particular experiment, however, allows the potential for the automated development of genetic code along the lines of the automated production of pharmaceuticals (eg. combinatorial biosynthesis) which has been successfully applied for decades. Having developed a process of effectively "stitching together [a genome] from smaller stretches of DNA synthesised in the lab" from raw data, Venter's lab has essentially created a method for producing genetic versions of Frankenstein's monster, the difference being that billions of attempts could be efficiently made in order to arrive at one that actually thrives. While this technology remains as yet unapplied, one cannot help but wonder how this engagement of the digital and the genetic has already altered our status in the universe. As Siegfried Kracauer wrote in "Boredom", "Radio likewise vaporizes beings, even before they have intercepted a single spark."

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18942-immaculate-creation-birth-of-the-first-synthetic-cell.html

Brian Johnson

Digital Art vs. Video Games

2010-05-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

In class, we briefly talked about Hansen's problematic omission of the subject of video games in his book, New Philosophy For New Media. I believe the big question is: what is the difference between digital art and video game images? Hansen explains that in the digital image the body creates the image; the image cannot exist without the body. Our bodies serve as a filter of the data that the digital interface supplies and through our filtration, we create an image. Video games have allowed players to create different digital material as an effect of their bodily intervention since the early 1980's. The comparison is even more compelling now with the rise of new video game consoles and arcades that involve the human body to higher and more active degree such as the Nintendo Wii, the Rock Band games, and Dance Revolution.

So if both of these mediums engage the body, then what really sets them apart? For me, the answer is pretty straightforward. With video games, there is always an objective involved (as with all games). While the player is indeed creating and manipulating digital images by way of their bodily input, the manipulation of the image is only a byproduct of the objective of the player, and that is to complete the game, advance to the next level, save the princess, etc. The digital art that Hansen writes about is "objectiveless" for the viewer. Everyone can interact with these pieces in their own unique way and there is no prize for the viewer who completes the interaction in the best way. I think this simple difference separates the two mediums enough for Hansen that he feels it is not even necessary to mention. If there was a video game where the player merely just controlled a character through a digital space, but there was no other goal beyond that set forth for them, then I think the digital interface would cease to be a video game.

--Jonathan Masino

The City as a Milieu for the Virtual to Happen, Part One

2010-05-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

Guy Debord, the leader of Situationist International, in “Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography,” introduces the term psychogeography, which means the study of the particular effects of the environment on the emotions and behavior of city habitants. The prevailing mode of acting in the city, according to Debord, is usually controlled and manipulated by the consumerist ideology, which constantly proposes the legitimated actions within the city. Therefore, a representational layout of the contemporary city supports already known redundant practices within it. In this connection, Guy Debord states that the city should be explored without any preconceptions or prejudices. The Situationists criticize the ordinary mundane interactions with a constructed urban milieu and propose the practice of derive. This practice proposes to read the city interpretively, to turn the city around (détournement) and reconstruct it. In this context, the city practitioners see the possibilities (or we can say virtualities) of the city in places of present fragmentation rather than in already known and constructed areas. In my opinion, the Situationists tried to demonstrate the contrast between how the city life practice is effected by representations and what it could be beyond spectacular, representational impact.

In this connection, I found remarkable similarities between how Deleuze describes the attentive, non-representational ways of becoming, for instance, art practice or traveling, and the open city explorations suggested by the Situationists (and to some extent by Charles Baudelaire earlier). As Bergson states, the virtual image is only possible by having the zone of indetermination in our relations with other objects. In this light, Situationist thoughts about their practices remind me of the distinction between actual and virtual images in Bergson and Deleuze. According to the Situationists, psychogeography suggests the possibilities of new findings allowed by the unpredictable influence of the environment on human feelings. So any situation or conduct of a city's inhabitants that seems to reflect the spirit of discovery was understood as a search for something creative and new. Consequently, the Situationists were trying to realize the new practices within the city (spontaneous, unknown in advance), instead of following the mundane routes and actions. Thus, I would say, that an openness to the unknown, the virtual, is essential for an attentive experience of the city. And that is why I found the Situationist approach to the practice of everyday life close to the Deleuzian one.

Lukas

Some Closing Thoughts re: "Art After Deleuze" and the Whitney Biennial

2010-05-22T12:56:00.000-07:00

When Beom presented his project in our final class Wednesday night, there was some confusion as to whether the "work" itself was his sculpture, or the photos of his sculptures, or his lecture referencing the photos of his sculptures. His response was that it was not important to delineate between those processes or titles, since the "work" itself was composed of all three steps.

This nebulous mutation of art – a kind of constant coming-into-being within multiple different media – seems to me to be the most important recent development in contemporary art practice. It is both indebted to and contrary to Deleuzian theory in that his writing focused on singular works of art (i.e., in a single medium format) resulting from the artist's dynamic encounter with the ever-changing percepts and affects of the world. Yet the concept of creation-as-mutation is integral to work such as Beom's and the examples of 'relational art' and participatory, affective-response works profiled by Bourriard and Hansen. The implication is that Deleuze's 'becomings and trajectories' have moved from the stage of fabrication to the stages of conception, presentation, and reception – with fabrication now relegated to a supporting role to facilitate those stages. Artists are no longer passionate material craftspeople but thoughtful stewards or choreographers shuttling an idea through its various forms and ever-expanding applications. This change can be seen in all arts, from painting to music to sculpture to film/video, and it is being grappled with in widely varying ways.

Take the works on view this year at the Whitney Biennial. If this is any indication of the state of contemporary art (and maybe it is, maybe it isn't), confusion and apathy seem to reign. There is a paucity of moving or passionately conceived work in the exhibition, and after seeing it I felt as cynical about the power and potential of art as the majority of artists represented in the show seem to be. Though I don't follow the discussion closely, I know the various Biennials are highly political, buzzy, pop-culture events within the art world, and there are intense debates concerning their rigor and credibility. Leaving that debate aside, I'll focus on the Whitney exhibition in the context of our class material.

It seems as if many artists working today are unmoored by the shifting nature of art's "body." More often than not, their response is to simply literalize that concept – usually with disappointing results.

Some works attempt this through invoking a physiological affective response in the viewer (a la Jeffrey Shaw in Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media). For example, R.H. Quaytman's optical pattern silkscreens unsettle the eyes and therefore the body for no apparent reason except to foreground the 'nature of perception' (that old standby!) and skillfully invoke the building window that inspired them. Even the artist's statement cancels out the possibility of any determined aim. (“I seek to maintain and simultaneously disrupt painting’s absolute presence.”1 ) Uh, okay. So it's about non-space or non-presence? In relation to what – interior design?

The other common approach to literalizing art's shifting mediations is to obscure the work's affiliation to any particular medium. Because everything is art nowadays, nothing is – it is all derived from other areas of visual reproduction, and curators seem reluctant to draw hard lines between genres for fear of seeming conservative or limited in their thinking. Several works at the Whitney capitalize on that confusion and "inclusiveness." Pae White's smoke tapestry, Charles Ray's willowy flowers, and Aurel Schmidt's detritus-as-beauty drawings are primarily works of graphic design, illustration and political cartooning, respectively, that seem to have talked their way into the art exhibition circuit. The documentary photographs of Stephanie Sinclair and Nina Berman are powerful examples of photojournalism at its best, but they have nothing to do with the plane of immanence into which an artist, according to Deleuze, must enter in order to construct something new from the world.

To be fair, this confusion does not necessarily originate in the artists, as art institutions dictate to some degree the playing field. Case in point, the Whitney's description of this year's Biennial is totally noncommittal ("…simply titled 2010 [it] embodies a cross section of contemporary art production rather than a specific theme" 2 ….to which I'm tempted to ask, "Then what are we paying you for?"). It's true there isn't much of a theme among the new works, except perhaps "creepy suburbia" (e.g., Josephine Meckseper's "Mall of America," James Casebere's "Landscape with Houses", Duane Hanson's lifelike sculpture of a middle-aged housewife).

Rather than simplistically literalizing or trivializing the process by which art is shifting form, blurring genre boundaries, and engaging viewers in disorienting ways, some artists are attempting to engage with this ambiguity in genuinely risky ways. Duane Hanson's sculptures are rigorous in their conception and execution; their careful fabrication process seems to require the artist's personal engagement with the affects and percepts of human figuration, while forcing him (and us) to grapple with figurative sculpture's transition from idealized portraiture to arbiter of decaying social relations.

Among the video works, Sharon Hayes' "Parole" applies skillful filmmaking techniques to portray moments defined by body language and movement (e.g., interviews, interrogations, and dance) and creates an immersive environment for the viewer in which screens and sounds layer upon one another, building in relation to the timing of the viewer's entrance into the space. Like the immersive projection environments of Aernout Mik, this work is passionately political yet nebulous in its aesthetic footing and genre classification. There is a sense we are on a journey with the artist through the works' multiple permutations – as if the images' independent juxtapositions and interactions (the "something that goes beyond testimony to the photographer's art" described by Walter Benjamin3) determines the outcome. The work does not exist solely inside the frame of the images, but in the conflagration of all the screens interacting at once, through and without the viewer – who may be a witness or a participant to the videos' content.

Whether successful or not, today's questioning, unsettled art works show that we are grappling with a new kind of practice whose trajectory must cross not only different media forms but different states of being, in order to become whole. With regards to my own web-based and film/video projects, which feed into and grow out of one another in various shifting ways, I am discovering that the creative process is a kind of constant reconfiguration (Bergson's 'kaleidoscopic' assemblage of images in relation to "the privileged image" of the body4). With no fixed entry or end points, this process unfolds within the germinating pool of ideas or images that I find myself constantly revisiting in one form or another.

Thanks, Sam and everyone, for a great class. Happy summer...

---Noelia

--------------------------

1Whitney Biennial website [http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/2010Biennial]; accessed May 20-21, 2010.

2 Ibid.

3 Benjamin, Walter. "Little History of Photography," The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott et al. (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 276.

4 Bergson, Henri. “Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation,” in Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1911), pp. 12-13.

Crisis of the Historical-Image

2010-05-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

One of the things that struck me in Andrei Tarkovsky's book Sculpting In Time, was his theories on films embedded in specific time periods. He spends a small section of the essay talking about the challenges his crew faced when filming Andrei Rublyov, which takes place in the fifteenth century. He makes the bold claim that by focusing too much on "how everything was" the filmmaker actually does the cinema a disservice [1]. In virtually every big production period piece we see today, the primary emphasis is put on historical accuracy: Do the costumes match the period? Are the actor's speaking in correct accents? Do the props and the scenery evoke the proper time? These obsessions with period and detail only detract from the emotion, the rhythm, and the character of the film. Asking these questions will only kill time, which Tarkovsky tries so hard to sustain. The image becomes completely historical, but for Tarkovsky, history is not time; it is only a consequence of it [2].

Tarkovsky would probably argue that when making a period piece, the filmmaker should be emphasizing the likeness between the film and the viewer instead of the difference. This would be the only way to enable the audience to endure time through the cinema. By magnifying the minute details of the period, the cinema becomes more of a museum hall than a proper theater. The material is instantly frozen in time and made into a relic, inaccessible by the audience. The viewer is distanced from anything the filmmaker might be trying to convey.

In Andrei Rublyov, while the art direction is appropriate for the times, it isn't beaten over the viewer's head. The audience is able to experience the characters more closely and the long takes become more contemplative and visceral as opposed to simply visual. I'm actually trying to achieve the same thing in my graduate film, which takes place in an unspecified time and place circa war torn Europe in the early twentieth century. I was undaunted by the difficulty in shooting a period piece on a low student budget, because of the notion that I could establish a better sense of time without emphasizing the era, but how I believe that time was experienced by the characters. Just because a film is made in a classical period does not mean it must be made classically; one can make full use of the more modern time-image, which Deleuze speaks of. As he also states, the time-image creates a sense of present/pastness. The films that focus on capturing historically accurate details are only considering the past, and are not merging it with the present viewing, which is necessary for the time-image. This historical-image is fully crystallized in that it has already achieved everything it can; there is no more virtual and there is no more connection to the body. The historical-image has become all it can before it is even viewed by an audience. The affect for the viewer would only be one of an academic appreciation at best, but not new though process would be generated. With the time-image, the image is still alive and can continue to become.

(1) Tarkovsky, Andrei Sculpting in Time, p.78
(2) Tarkovsky, Andrei Sculpting in Time, p.57

--Jonathan Masino

The Whitney Pla(q/g)ue

2010-05-22T10:44:00.001-07:00

The Whitney Biennial 2010 validated a problem I encountered with the same museum six years ago: the fetishism of theory. I do not know if it is from the curators or the artists, but there is a tendency to finalize the experience of the artwork with overreaching statements. While I did like some of the work displayed, I will not go into details about them. What bothered me was that after looking at the artwork, I read sentences that I found perplexing. I felt like I was reading something movie commercials on TV would do. One superimposed text for commercial for Taken (2008) read, "Move over Bourne, here comes the next action hero." The former film is about human trafficking; The Bourne Identity is a film about espionage. Of course, the movie industry was forcing the action angle, and it seems that the Whitney was the authority of ideas, as Hollywood is the authority of wish fulfillment.

The "art world" theorizes like a secret that visitors stumble upon, yet this secret is revealed because it conceals a problematic within the art world: the art definition. Words like "Surrealist can draw romantic flights of the style, "weird" or "avant-garde." Instead of allowing viewers to exhibit the artwork, the curators allowed statements to represent the artwork. As a result, there is a severe disconnect between what you read and what you see. For instance, part of the description for "Michael and Charles," by Lorraine O'Grady, claims that the pairing of the pop singer and poet is "raising issues of class, race and the highly ambivalent nature of beauty that the new abstraction ignores." So Michael is black/Negro/African American, and Charles is French. Am I supposed to validate the ongoing struggle to demote white superiority? Are Jackson's standardized pop songs superior to Baudelaire's poems? Are they compatible? Hindering this line of thought I'm supposed to follow is a white ambulance/hearse in the middle of the room, spewing a female voice. Am I supposed to appreciate the photographs by being distracted? As for the "highly ambivalent nature of beauty," I guess those ads for Gap, Mabelline, and Calvin Klein make ambiguous statements. Why do women wear make-up, and why do men unbutton their buttoned shirts?

The plague of catchwords disseminate the infect visitors with the 'oh" response, so that they can proceed to the next artwork and nod along. Thus, the plaque narrows discourse by imposing an ideological wall, where one the other side "they" know what's going on with art these days.

by Raul Garcia

Post Production Process: Manhattan Rhizome

2010-05-22T06:58:00.000-07:00

I have never really thought about mood and tone in the editing process and decided that this would be something I would like to start with as a reference point or guide. I started listening to jazz music and became enchanted with the sounds of Miles Davis especially his album titled KIND OF BLUE. I decided to research how the album was created and I discovered that the entire album was an unrehearsed studio session. KIND OF BUE, in my opinion was its own rhizome. I immediately imported the song BLUE AND GREEN and used its rhythm and sound as a map for my editing process.

I decided to group the images in sets of three with the moving HD footage first, the digital still second and the 16 mm footage third. I felt like the photographs in the middle of the HD and 16mm footage anchored the material. All the moving pictures were shot with the camera being handheld and are, at times, insecure. Choosing the groupings of three, in the beginning was a little frustrating. I found the selection maddening when I was focused on the result and didn’t let the material speak for itself. This is going to sound strange but whenever I felt blocked or stuck I made the decision to remind myself that the image was alive and to allow it to tell me who or what it wanted to be grouped with. This made me feel a little crazy at times but it was very fun and the following quote from Bergson inspired me, “Here I am in the presence of images, in the vaguest sense of the word, images perceived when my senses are open to them, unperceived when they are closed.” [1] I opened up my senses to the images and tried to hear what they were articulating.

An example of this is the last and third groping of the HD, digital photo, and 16mm section. I started with the moving HD image of the intersection in Little Italy, which ends on the restaurant UMBERTO’S CLAM HOUSE. I really like the pacing and movement of the CLAM HOUSE image but could not come up with a photograph that somehow connected with it. I sat and looked at my computer and tried many combinations of the material. Nothing looked or felt right, I was stuck! I took food breaks, went back to final cut, I shopped online, went back to final cut, I checked my e-mails but nothing seemed to work. I decided to look at the image and try to hear what it was saying to me and all of a sudden I heard the word blue. Then it came to me, the Yankee boy in the blue hat. I put the two images together and they worked perfectly. Originally I had decided that the Yankee boy photograph was to posed but when I put it next to the moving “blue” HD footage it took on a new meaning and I began to see the mapping of this boy’s brash bravado and my Manhattan Rhizome.

After this experience listening to the footage became much easier. Next I decided that my groups of three were finished and I would start building the climax of the piece. This kind of flew and I had very little trouble putting the material together. I decided on a 2,3,3,1,1, combination. Basically this translates into 2 digital photographs, next (3) 16 mm static shots, (2) more photos and ( 1) 16 mm shot ending with a long take in HD Footage. I was satisfied with the rhythm and movement of the piece and felt good about the work.

In conclusion, taking this class and creating MANHATTAN RHIZOME has been a very enlightening and interesting process. Never before have I created a piece without a huge tracing of work looming and impregnating the process. Also this was the first time that I consciously chose to practice my art infused with film theory and thought. I can honestly say that this piece is truly alive and still is a work in progress. My rhizome of Manhattan still has many more entry and exists points to be discovered.

Deirdre

[1] Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, pg 24

A Woman Under the Influence

2010-05-21T18:04:00.000-07:00

When writing on Deleuze and Cassavetes, I wanted to examine how Cassavetes was able to take Deleuze’s modern elements of cinema and create a highly affective film. Cassavetes has the ability to draw emotional responses from his viewers, and I used Deleuze’s writings to better understand the way in which he is able to accomplish this in his films. The following is a scene that I consider to be a solid representation of Cassavetes’ directing style. In this scene, Mabel is confronted by her husband, Nick, about her deteriorating mental state. Nick’s mother and Dr. Zepp are called to the house to help regulate the situation and enforce her institutionalization. I have a love-hate relationship with this scene each time I view it. I find it unsettling and difficult to endure because of the intensity of the acting and the subject matter. However, I don’t want to look away from the action either. This scene also exemplifies the way in which Cassavetes would force the audience to fully experience an entire situation with the actors on screen. He lingers in the scene and refused to make any unnecessary edits. According to Cassavetes, experiencing the entirety of the scene was imperative the structure of the film. “You can’t edit the film any more than you can direct the film. You’re not able to make the film play any better than it plays…Take the scene of Mabel’s breakdown, for example. We had to prolong it. The sequence was full because unless you actually see them do that, unless you actually see the continuity of that, the actual idea that he would do this and carry it through could have been weakened.” Also, it is easy to detect Cassavetes’ stance on the use of cinematography. The DP was told to follow the action he felt was important in that moment, instead of having distinct set-ups for each shot. Overall, this scene exemplifies many elements of Deleuze’s concepts of modern cinema, along with the emergence of thought and the mental-image in film.

Here are the links to the majority of Mabel's breakdown scene (my apologies for having to navigate away from the page, but uploading was not possible due to the size of the two clips):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zPVpRGlPbo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgUf4VBaRjo

- Stephanie Class

Notes on a Filmosopher

2010-05-21T14:44:00.000-07:00

From Ridley Scott, director of Gladiator (2000), comes Robin Hood. The trailer for that popular film type informs audiences that watching an epic story will be like watching the other. Thus, they will have some expectations about Robin Hood because they presumably have watched the former film. Trailers are not necessarily shown in movie theaters: they proliferate online and on TV. Thus, Daniel Frampton’s idea a film is “an organic intelligence…a ‘film being’ thinking about the characters and subjects in the film” suggests that audiences encounter films without any notion of what it is or where it came from (7). I agree with Frampton that film induces some kind of a waking dream state, where we forget about directors, Hollywood, and camera angles to experience the film as a new world. However, we are not innocent to filminds or film worlds, especially if we are anticipating moments in some film worlds, as if we have travelogues prepared/habituated thanks to the domination of narrative.

Frampton states that film offers philosophy, rather than validating philosophical concepts. I see no problem in philosophers using film for philosophical discourse. Films can reveal the intricacies of debates like cloning and the sanctity of identity, or the instability of judicial meaning in particular legal situations. Besides, some narratives express philosophical issues by their very construction: story and character. If academic writing takes the position of philosophy offering its services to film, then it is the filmind that does this in its form of thinking.

Frampton also implies a general definition for or identification of cinema. An aspect of the filmind is “the creation of the basic film-world of recognisable people and objects” (6). Thus, as long as representations of reality are perceived, then the filmind is a legitimate being. Otherwise, nonrepresentational images have no existence. Since this concept is intended for the moviegoer, then he or she will accept narrative films as cinema. Abstract films do not any “film-thinking,” for there is no designing and figuring of the film-world. If films are to be treated as autonomous beings, then experimental/abstract films should garner the equality that standardized films have, in their recognition as filminds.

By Raul Garcia

Work Cited

Frampton, Daniel. Filmosophy. London: Wallflower Press, 2006.

Excerpt From My Essay on Computation and Process: Thoughts on HCI

2010-05-21T14:14:00.000-07:00

There were a few questions after my presentation on the details concerting serial and parallel processing in computation. Here is a pretty good link to a op-ed article by the chief scientist at NVIDIA: Life After Moore's Law By Bill Dally

Affective Relations with Computation: the problem of HCI:
There is currently a problem of transparency in the affective process of creation involving computed media. The process of computed media is generally obscured by perfect emulation of other forms of media. Lev Manovich’s critique of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) is merely a limited form of this issue.[i] The issue of HCI is not as Manovich states that it is bound to a cinematic mode but that HCI is a layer of mediation that obscures the procedural essence of computation. This layer of mediation draws on many different forms of media and epistemological organizations work to mask the procedural relation between artists and computation. In order for computed media and concepts to express and implicate truly new affects and concepts it will be necessary for those engaged to have a intimate and honest relation to the processes in which they explore.

An artist or thinker who wants to approach computed media on its own plane of immanence is to engage with the procedures that computation makes possible. This is not to say that the ability for an HCI to adequately emulate processes of previous media is bad. It is the mutability of computation that is its tremendously useful power. Yet for computed media to implicate something new, practitioners must engage with it on a much more intimate level.
This of course occurs in most experimental media in which the line between artist and engineer is largely extinct. There is however often a barrier to communicability of the experience of these practitioners and those who would be affected by their creations. It is fortunate that to experience a sculpture, painting, or even film can connect a viewer to the process by which the artist and medium are engaged. One can see and feel the artists brush strokes, chisel marks and imagine the directors splice at each cut. Computed media does not provide us with this kind of connection as long as it is used to emulate other media. For example, if digital-cinema is to critically approach computation it should impart to a high level of procedural transparency in which the viewer can be actively aware of the computed sequence that produces the images before their eyes.

[i] Manovich, Lev, "The Language of New Media," MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 2001. pp. 88-93.

Here is a link to the full essay for those interested.

A Nincompoop

2010-05-21T12:00:00.000-07:00

[T]he writer makes a diagnosis, but what he diagnoses is the world; he follows the illness step by step, but it is the generic illness of man.[1] Thus I read Chekhov's Nincompoop, and saw a story about today's ill man that is no longer man confined but a man in dept[2]. For such a man, the life is an ever approaching but never present future. The past is either a sentiment or a gray area, and the present is nonexistent as it is going by while the man is gazed at the future. In this future lie locked all the man's ideals and aims. The future is the promised but forever delayed life.

(…)

Both the sense of unworthy (or not being worth enough) and the fear of losing something that one believes one is possessing are the dominant emotional-mental states of the human being in what Deleuze calls control society.[3] When talking about the contemporary society as the control society, as one of its main traits, Deleuze designates the phenomenon of the endless postponement, opposing it to the apparent acquittal in the disciplinary society that it was preceded by. Nothing is ever finished and everything is in a constant process of being created or yet to be reached. One of the most indicative examples that he gives is the phenomenon of continuing education along with its endless degree stadiums both on the horizontal and vertical line. It is an imposed sense that one can always be perfected[4] – more trained, more educated, which implicitly but unmistakably keeps suggesting that one is not knowledgeable enough or competent enough, therefore, one is never ready enough, i.e. never worth enough. However this chain of conclusions might seem logically incorrect when considered from the position of the "common sense" (or of the classical logics), we should be reminded of the "irrational" human logic that we are far more led by. This irrational logic creates a constant anxiety of imperfection and of not being able to fulfill the expectations. Therefore, one rarely dares trying. Therefore, Mary never dares.

Similarly, one sticks to what one has in the fear of losing even that. However, it is also an illusion, for in the control society one rarely actually has, i.e. owns something. Except for debts, which is nothing but a modern slavery. Even when one does own something, one can never be sure to have the full access. It is like Guattari's imaginary town. One can always fear that the password may be denied or that the figures might be somehow changed or confused. The truth or even the very existence is confirmed by the presence in the system. That is the number noted down in Henry's computer – it is at the same time terribly silly and terrifyingly serious.

However, in my story, Mary is not a poor victim, the oppressed worth of shed tears. Control society, as any type of society, can exist only by the consensus of its members – the people of whom it is consisted. It is supported by their will, or the lack of will to confront it. In Mary's case, it is the latter – the decision that is being justified as a present sacrifice for the future life – the delayed one, the one that will probably never come. Finally, the one she essentially might not even want to come, for desire can desire forms of constancy as much as it desires its fluidity.[5] As stated by May, Deleuze goes further in his political thinking by not theorizing only about the oppressive ideology, but instead questioning mechanisms that constitute the individual's acceptance of oppression. This is probably one of the most thorough insights of Deleuze's thought. It is also, once again, his uncompromising insistence on life, therefore, his deep affirmation of it. He does not remain on the level of general and abstract entities, such are systems, ideologies, institutions, the State or revolutions, where is quite easy to lose the sense of an individual and organic, and almost unnoticeably, to start referring to these entities as organisms or structures completely independent of (even transcendent to) the individuals their existence depends on. As a matter of fact, I find this anticipated in his basic philosophical decision of the idea of immanence. By rejecting the transcendent, i.e. an a priori or external cause to the world, Deleuze is making an ethical step that is certainly not a new one but always remains the most radical – he is bringing down the responsibility back to the individual. His affirmation of life is not a jolly one. His concept of becoming does not mean an utterly improvised life. And his own Ubermensch is not an individual that floats wherever the current takes him to. By taking the transcendent, the substance, the eschatological and untimely away from the human, he demands the Individual. At this point I cannot help be reminded of the parable of The Grand Inquisitor and its main statement: they don't want to be free. Or, what May rightfully claims to be Deleuze's great political discovery: what keeps us all from becoming revolutionaries is not that we are fooled, but that we have come to desire what oppresses us.[6] And we persist in being oppressed for the sake of remaining within constancy, within the familiar. For, more often than not, the fear of the unknown will prevent any genuine movement. That is my reading of A Nincompoop.

Vladana

[1] Gilles Deleuze, “Re-presentation of Masoch,”in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), pp. 53

[2] Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations, pp. 181

[3] Although I do not claim that these are the unique qualities of such a society, I do think that they are significantly intensified in it.

[4] And one indeed can, but here the focus is how the fact is being utilized for purposes other than one's perfecting oneself.

[5] Todd G. May, The Politics of Life in the Thought of Gilles Deleuze, SubStance, Vol. 20, No. 3, Issue 66: Special Issue: Deleuze & Guattari (1991), pp. 29 (http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685177)

[6] Ibid, pp.31

Julie Mehretu: Capitalizing on Smooth Capital

2010-05-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

During our final evening together (and, indeed, throughout the semester and on this blog) the concepts of smoothness and striation have been especially fruitful, most recently in the presentations by Raul and Vanessa, for instance, partly I think because of the relatively clear visual analogies that they conjure up–to, say, the smooth ocean and the striated urban grid–while related terms like becoming and being remain more abstract. Our understanding of these opposite yet always contiguous if not overlapping notions of smoothness and striation become partly unsettled (or... smoothed?) when Deleuze and Guattari make the further distinction in A Thousand Plateaus (1980) that now, at the "dominant level of integrated (or rather integrating) world capitalism, a new smooth space is produced in which capital reaches its 'absolute' speed, based on machinic components rather than the human component of labor" (492). We addressed this capitalist version of smoothness briefly in class, attributing it to new forms of capitalism that have emerged in the last 30 to 40 years, types of capitalist societies and cultures in which the multinational corporation replaces the State as the dominant agent of control. What makes contemporary global capitalism smooth rather than striated, from what I understand, is that it constantly offers more, and at greater speeds. As an undergraduate professor once put it to me, very helpfully: Whereas pre-capitalist societies and early forms of capitalism said "No," contemporary global capitalism always says "Yes." Though this much is clear, and fairly intuitive, I began to wonder (as this is a question that came up as I was writing my final paper) how we might represent this absolutely smooth capitalism that is constantly in the process of becoming smoother. Having just seen the new exhibition of large-scale mixed media canvases by Julie Mehretu at the Guggenheim, Grey Area (through October 6), her work immediately struck me as one of the most well-developed and eloquent representations of this smooth capitalism in contemporary art. The fact that the works were commissioned by a global bank, Deutsche Bank, adds a further irony to this fact.

Mehretu is an American artist who was born in Ethiopia in 1970, her work consists of large-scale drawings, collages and paintings that she composes as separate layers first on a computer, then projects these digital images onto her massive canvases (each of the six pieces in this exhibition are 11 feet tall and 14 feet wide) and applies a range of materials from acrylic paints and ink to pencil and strips of paper, each in successive layers. Once the different levels (sometimes as many as six) are applied and fixed she makes more gestural, expressionist additions to the final composition. In this exhibition she rubbed and scraped certain areas, creating ghostly patches of erasure, destruction and absence. The resulting compositions are spectacularly busy yet almost infinitely zoom-able; that is, the level of detail in Mehretu's work is such that one can focus on a very small section of any piece and still have more than enough details and layers to tease apart. The super-imposed patterns in each piece include: architectural vectors of virtually every style of building, from classical and Renaissance structures to modern skyscrapers, airports and stadiums; pointillist ink blots that often cluster to evoke flocks of birds or swarms of insects; narrow strips of acrylic paint in neon and pastel hues that, though very subtle, direct the viewers' eyes with sharp diagonal lines; thicker bands and geometric forms of cut-out paper that often bend, curve and loop, suggesting cyclical patterns rather than unidirectional movements; and soft, transparent, cloud-like areas of primary colors.

The very affecting visual challenge in much of her work, at least initially, is to distinguish the various superimposed layers and then understand the myriad ways in which they do or don't work together, continuing and complimenting each other's forms and dimensions. Her process of superimposition, in which the architectural diagrams are always the bottom layer, the first one applied, evokes Deleuze and Guattari's comment that "when the striated attains its ideal of perfect homogeneity, it is apt to reimpart smooth space" (488). In Mehretu's work, the most striated elements, these architectural drawings, seem to give shape to the smoother forms at play above, as if this fundamental architectonic groundwork were necessary to give rise to the churning, slipping and swarming layers that come after. In her work, striation always precedes smoothness in much the same way that striated capital necessarily preceded smooth capital. Her compositions are extremely fluid despite their many rectilinear components. There is often a predominant flow or movement to each piece, whether sweeping across the canvas or swirling in circular currents, but within isolated sections it's nearly impossible to discern a specific direction or perspective. Each composition is made up of seemingly infinite elements and multiple layers that nevertheless contribute to an overarching system that is dazzling, polysemic and unquantifiable. In this respect, Mehretu's work offers what seems to me a very appropriate and nuanced visual representation of the type of smoothness being perpetually generated, expanded and amplified by contemporary global capitalism. Both are impossibly complex systems made up of qualitatively distinct elements–some of which seem smooth while others are irrevocably striated–that nonetheless make up extremely dynamic and smooth forms. Part of what makes contemporary global capitalism so insidious is the way in which it seems to evade representation and resistance by being in a constant state of change of acceleration. Mehretu, it seems to me, manages to convey this process of never-ending renewal, flux and expansion, and with spectacular clarity.

-Ben Sutton

Time Image Striation

2010-05-19T10:47:00.000-07:00

My final project is going to be a series of long take video experiments that attempt to evoke the link between action image and time image as well as suggesting their interchangeability. In Gilles Deleuze’s two books on cinema (Cinema 1 and Cinema 2) he talks about the evolution of the film medium by nature of its frames and especially of the images it produces. In Cinema 1 Deleuze describes the images of the classical era as action images. That is to say that they are predicated by cause and effect. Every shot, every movement, every piece of dialogue is motivated in some way, shape or form. The characters in these classical films were always active, never passive. There is always a goal for the protagonist to aspire to and there is always an obstacle that must be overcome. These images remain constant in film until the aftermath of World War II where we see an emergence of a new kind of image. This time image, as Deleuze refers to it as, represents the movement towards modern cinema where characters are reflective instead of active. We see them observe through the frame and as a consequence, the audience thinks and perceives with the character.

I would liken the time-image described in Cinema 2, as a manifestation of another Deleuzian concept, smooth space, which Deleuze discusses in detail along with collaborator, Felix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus. For Delueze, smooth space is defined by its unlimited variation and its vast realm of possibility. In the time-image, the viewer and the character(s) are both in an ineffable space absent of any provocation. According to Deleuze, we become a new breed of character in this space because we are contemplative and unsure in lieu of being reactive and physically or emotionally active. This a-centered mental capacity brings the viewer and the character into a state of smoothness where the trajectory of our perception is boundless and our tactile acuity is heightened. Our collective minds become a smooth nomad wandering from thought to thought with no anticipated direction in sight.

On the contrary, the action-image would be of the same ilk as striated space. The formulaic structure of action-oriented plots and movement changes at pre-defined junctures is a form of striation that regulates the delivery and construction of cinema. The viewer was to be ensconced in the narrative so that any other elements of the filmmaking apparatus (i.e. music, soundtrack, camera movement, etc.) were only to be used to enhance the narrative and if they couldn't, they were to be downplayed so as to go unnoticed by the viewer (e.g. cuts in the middle of actions).

So if we can come to the conclusion that the action-image is a form a striation and the time-image a form of smoothness, then we should also be lead to the conclusion that the time-image and the action-image can become each other and reach a point of interchangeability just as it is so for smooth and striated space (e.g. the naturally smooth dessert being segmented and striated by mapmakers) as Deleuze asserts. For Deleuze, neither smooth nor the striated spaces are permanent and impervious to change and becoming. Once again, the goal of my project is to display this interchangeability and constant evolution between the action-image and time-image relationship through the film media itself. This will be done through a series of long take experimental shots that look to alter perception from the haptic to the optic within the same continuous shot. I hope to achieve an affection that is not static, but continuously emerging. Although I’m sure (in true Deleuze fashion) the process of developing these short projects will reveal even more ideas about morphing viewing experience within shots, which can be further explored in future endeavors.

--Jonathan Masino

Revisiting Metropolis

2010-05-18T20:38:00.000-07:00

Film Forum is currently showing a restored version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. This version contains 25 additional minutes of footage that had been lost for decades. It is sometimes effortless to visually locate the new footage due to the change in the quality of the images. They are somewhat grainer and the colors seem more muted. However, it is easy to overlook this due to the way this additional footage adds to the overall narrative of the film.

I haven’t seen a projected version of Metropolis since I was approximately eighteen years old. It is definitely a film in which the smaller formats do not give justice to the scale of the film, and its visual impact is lost can be lost to an extent. It was nice to see the intricacies of this masterpiece of German Expressionism enhanced as it was projected once again. I think that I had forgotten about how every shot is perfectly framed and every set is visually stimulating. Lang’s ability to play with light and shadow truly helps to accentuate the impressive set pieces.

One of the aspects of this film that I find most interesting is how the narrative remains relevant decades after the film’s production. The class struggle between the subterranean workers and the city planners is timeless. We still see different versions of this class struggle in today’s society. Issues of capitalism can span decades of time as well as bridge cultural divides. Also, the film brings into question the state of our possible “future existence.” It forces the audience to imagine what the future will hold and how we will each be effected by it. Deleuze mentions Metropolis and other Fritz Lang films throughout both Cinema 1 and Cinema 2. He concludes some of his thoughts on German Expressionism in Cinema 2, in which he focuses on how this film movement confronts issues of the future.

The man-machine assemblage varies from case to case, but always with the intention of posing the question of the future. And machines can take hold so fully on man that it awakens the most ancient powers, and the moving machine becomes one with the psychological automaton pure and simple, at the service of a frightening new order: this is the procession of somnambulists, the hallucinators, hypnotizers-hypnotized in expressionism, from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Testament of Dr. Mabuse via Metropolis and its robot. German cinema summoned up primitive powers, but is was perhaps best placed to announce something new which was to change cinema, horribly to ‘realize’ it and thus to modify its basic themes. (263)

The fact that this film is able to still create a cerebral response in its viewers allows us to see magnitude of this film’s impact overall, and how it will continue to be considered an infinitely important film.

Revisiting Metropolis allowed me to see how my relationship with the cinema has changed since I was younger. I remember the first time I saw a projected version of the film in a small screening room in Chicago (as opposed to the home viewing versions I had previously seen), and being humbled by the production design and visual impact of the film. I was extremely impressed by the style of German Expressionism once I was able to view the film on a larger format. However, my recent viewing of the film left me being affected by the film’s narrative. I found the story to be equally as interesting as the visual style of the film, was completely caught up in the characters’ lives. Overall, viewing the restored version of Metropolis was not only an enjoyable experience, but it also was able to remind me how my relationship with the cinema has shifted over the years.

- Stephanie Class

The Trouble With Striation

2010-05-18T15:48:00.000-07:00

As a final post for the semester I would like to address something that I have brought up before, but this time look at it from a more personal place. I would like to re-introduce and discuss the distinction that John Rajchman (2000), in The Deleuze Connections, refers to as the difference between “using” Deleuze’s philosophy and “applying” it. He explains that,

One might thus say of Deleuze’s own style – with its peculiar usage of words (including “concept” itself), in composition in series or plateaus, its disparate, seamless “smoothness” and distinctive humor – that it works to encourage “uses” while frustrating “applications,” and so to serve as “interceder” inciting creation or thinking in other nonphilosophical domains (p.118).

Rajchman is thus drawing on Deleuze’s own project (his theory and his mode of writing) in order to determine the appropriate ways in which his work might continue to “move.”

So what exactly does it mean to use someone’s concepts versus applying them? In the case of Deleuze (and Guattari) it is helpful to look at the relationship between some of their main concepts, such as “smooth/striated,” “tree/rhizome,” “map/trace,” and “major/minor.” While the specific philosophical ideas of each of these conceptual pairs are different, their relationship to each other remains similar, and I think that it would be fair to include Rajchman’s “use/apply” to the set. These concepts relate to each other in the following two ways: 1) In each relationship it is not a simple question of one or the other, because one can become the other quite easily and unexpectedly; 2) It is always the more dominant term (striated, tree, trace, major, apply) that tries to regiment, solidify, and homogenize the more fluid and potentialized one (or visa versa).

That said, the problem with using vs. applying strikes me as something that is nonetheless a tad problematic. Why? Because in trying to decide (whether as an artist, philosopher, or scientist) how you are using his concepts, a tendency to striate your process begins to develop. Not in trying to remain academically rigorous and aware of the details of the argument, but in the way that that can turn into simply “re-tracing” that which has already been stated, not keeping it moving, and rendering it solid. In my case, I was editing a documentary for a final school project with the goal in mind of trying to understand the space and time of my Grandparents condo complex in Florida. What I encountered, upon receiving feedback from my production class, was that I needed to cut, cut, cut. I found this to be very confusing because I was caught between trying to remain in step with a practice that encouraged a particular relationship to time and space on the one hand and the demand to make a good (entertaining) film, on the other (and these things I believe are not necessarily opposed!).

In the end, I was not sure whether I was trying simply to apply Deleuze to a process that was increasingly striated or whether I was using his ideas to smooth it out. Ultimately, I have not finished this project and I do not have an answer to this problem but I think, whether you’re an artist or academic, it is important to keep this issue in mind – and remember that it is not about being “Deleuzian” but about increasing lines of flight and keeping things open.

-Vanessa Meyer

Why Do People Go to the Cinema?

2010-05-18T08:13:00.000-07:00

Earlier in the semester we discussed Tarkovsky’s writings on the cinema in a chapter from his book, Sculpting in Time. The chapter "Imprinted Time" contained a myriad of intriguing concepts regarding the cinema in general. It was his discussion of the cinema experience that I found to be most interesting. Tarkovsky boldly asks, “Why do people go to the cinema?” He briefly examines the way in which, despite the commercialism and entertainment aspects of cinema, a person goes to the cinema to experience time:

He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, which have to do with the human need to master and know the world. I think that what a significantly longer. That is the power of the cinema: ‘stars,’ story-lines, and entertainment have nothing to do with it [i]

Tarkovsky successfully outlines the reasons why a person looks toward the cinema to experience life. Of course, there are people that depend on the cinema for entertainment too, but there are many more that go to the cinema to learn about life and learn about themselves in the process. I’ve always looked to the cinema as a therapeutic place, an educational place, and sometimes a place to be disturbed or shocked. It is a place to go and figure out yourself a little more through the images presented to you. I feel as though Tarkovsky’s description perfectly explains some of the reasons why I find the cinema to be amazing, interesting, and undoubtedly important to the art world.

However, is this experience negatively effected when the movie theater is taken out of the equation? Although Tarkovsky obviously wrote about cinema before the advent of certain new media and technology, which brought new formats to the film viewing experience, it is relevant to cinema today. Going to an actual movie theater is no longer necessary to view a film. It begs the question, are we losing an important aspect of the cinema by losing the movie theater experience? Personally, a movie theater will always be the optimum choice for viewing a movie. The theater separates the audience from outside distractions, thus allowing for a complete encounter with the piece. At home, the viewing experience is riddled with distractions and interruptions. A viewer can stop and start the movie at any point, work on other things while watching, or even skip through parts completely. Seeing a film in a theater creates a vastly different experience for the viewers than when it is seen in the privacy of their own homes.

Hollywood and capitalism have always been linked to one another. It is difficult not to look at that decline of the movie theater experience as a result of capitalistic ventures. However, one also must not completely put blame on capitalism for these issues. A movie ticket generally costs around $12.50 today. As much as I would always prefer to go to a theater, it isn’t always the most financially sound decision to makes. I can rent movies On-Demand for 24 or 48 hours for $4.99 or less. I can see more movies for the price I would be paying to go to a theater. Also, there are the online renting options, such as Netflix, which allow us to pay a monthly fee that is often times cheaper than one single movie ticket. Overall, the theaters aren’t giving the casual viewer much motivation to go to their venues.

It will be interesting to see how the new media outlets influence the production of film overall. Amateur filmmakers can easily have their work seen thanks to digital technology, which is certainly a positive aspect of the expansion of the cinema. However, many major filmmakers now must take into consideration how their film will be perceived on smaller formats (computers, home television screens, I-pods, etc.). A movie no longer must be viewed on a projected screen, thus possibly changing many of the aesthetic elements of the work.

Overall, the content remains the same no matter where a film is viewed. It is the audience’s response that can be influenced according to venue. The theater allows us to be completely immersed in the images and stories being projected for us. At home, we can allow our own lives to take precedence over the viewing experience. The actual film has not change, but our reading of it has altered according to the attention we give to it.

- Stephanie Class

[i] Tarkovsky, Andrei. Sculpting in Time. (Austin: University of Texas Press. 1989), 63.

The Class as New Media

2010-05-17T14:05:00.000-07:00

One of the questions that I was willing to answer my self with this course was how education can be approach with new media. After Hansen reading in addition to other readings related to the field. I realize than more that approaching education with new media is more about education as a new media. One particular statement from Hansen argument caught my attention, the importance of the body.

For Hansen the body is the place where the digital takes place. For me his argument can be well adapted for new education: what is new about new education is that the body is the center of what is possible in this field. If education takes place in our bodies it means that we are in an undefined terrain. I believe that it is only in the undefined where emergent education can evolve. We go back to Deleuze, it is only in the becoming where new education can take place. As Ellizabeth Ellsworth quotes in her book Places of Learning: media architecture, pedagogy. What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead… (William James).

It is in our bodies where we learn and trough our bodies how we learn. A great metaphor that Ellsworth brings to the field of learning and education is the parkour the sport of the art of moving trough the environment. I saw it clearly: art, architecture, the body moving with out previous maps. But best of all it is understanding this as a metaphor, because it means that this is what should be going on in our minds, in the minds of the teachers, in the design of a syllabus and in the goals of a class, among others. How to achieve the desired skills (just as in this sport the basic movement that you have to master in order to move smoothly) and at the same time be open to the new maps that each learner will trace? That is the challenge of the new education.

The concept of the prominence of the body in Hansen, although is radical about new media, is pertinent for education. First it is the understanding of our bodies as political beings that must be respect and developed consequently. Second as the place where ideas take place, it is about movement again, but the movement that takes place in our bodies even when we are resting, even when we are immobile in this point I disagree with Hansen because what he stating is that movement only occurs in the visible movement. Bergson (the body as an image in continuous movement) will further support the idea of the movement even in motionless.

Finally I would like to say that what is different in new education from Hansen’s postulate about the body it is that in new education the body is not only the receptacle of information or the framer of filter of information, instead of that, the body, the human being is the producer of meaning in education only in its continuous responses to knowledge is where becomes a learning being. What if we start seeing the class as a new media, as a new space where bodies inhabits the universe of knowledge? I’m sure that this is the only way of facing the world to come.

Susana

Media Ecology and Images

2010-05-17T08:15:00.000-07:00

Listening and looking at Caldwell’s and Ariel’s last presentations got me to thinking about the relationship of the natural to the digital. It is still the still image, more than any other form of media, that I feel is the outward representation of that brink and process. If perception and time all play a relevant part in the play of time and space (and how that interplay is (or can be) perceived) is central, then I think the still image is as well.

Hansen states that, “In this posthuman perceptual regime, the selection of information is no longer performed exclusively or even primarily by the human component (the body-brain as a center of indetermination)” (99), and I remember looking at that quote as I sat through Ariel’s really well-conceived presentation.

I wonder if the still image might best be reconsidered almost as a GUI, a basis from which to launch into the studies or applications or processes of human perception. The ability to drill down, to capture detail, to edit, provide frames of reference, to contextualize, to link… these are the things that have traditionally been fulfilled by the still image.For all of these things the still image could make for a launch point.

The natural world even provides for framesets through bioregions, continents, bodies of water, planets, etc. All of these things are energized through light, and a split second “framing” of that light might allow for an ability to realize the greater schemes that allow the natural world to work, and might serve as a blueprint for a truer media ecology of balance and flow.

-Mike vW

Framing Waves

2010-05-17T07:49:00.000-07:00

I’m primarily concerned with the idea of light and the way that the mechanism and body function in cahoots with the context of subject and light – as ways that the photographic image concerns perception and perspective. These are some of the bigger issues that I'm grappling with as I finish my paper.

Starting with Cache, he defines three formal elements of image: inflection, vector, and frame. For my discussion, the two parts I am most interested in are the vector and the frame and the relationship between the two. Specifically, what the frame consists of and how it catches the inflection and vector of wavelengths of light. To begin with the vector: if, as Cache states, “All landscapes can be described as hills and valleys, and time is said to flow” (44), it might be best to also view the vector-based wavelength of light as that philosophical extension of a full spectrum of a vector. (The photograph might link here to Bergson’s philosophy of the void: The image as a created void in the wavelength of light. Is this similar to the Eastern idea of the void, the state of all existence? If so, the photograph, the image, the void in the wave of light, should hold an embodied understanding of the spectrum of life. A photograph as a “dharma,” a point-instance of enlightenment.) This has been an issue I'm dealing with and trying to figure out.

Cache goes on to discuss the ideas of framing in the cinema, stating “The framing of emptiness within the fullness of light defines the screen…It is nether frame nor screen, but a passage from the screen to the frame; it is the architecture of the cinematographical mechanism that has become so crucial in our times" (65). What I take from this is that cinema has provided the ability for the image to link more clearly to a wavelength but still stays constant within a frame, delimited in what Hansen labels “the body.” Following this, Cache’s reading of Bergson’s concept of the image that “provides for convergence between a philosophy of the full – all images are something with a philosophy of the void – everything in only an image” might possibly support this light wavelength hypothesis. But what is the function of the present, of the viewing of the image? What is the relationship between the image, the present and reality?

Deleuze might best be employed in his explanation of how "Bergson was here working out new philosophical concepts relating to the theory of relativity: he thought relativity involved a conception of time which it didnt' itself bring out, but which was up to philosophy to construct." I think that the ideas of relativity come into play here as well, but as a wavelength more than as a frame ... unless the wavelength of light is to be "framed" only in relative terms and contexts.

--Mike vW

Rothko's Painting

2010-05-16T21:30:00.000-07:00

Once I stood in front of Rothko's painting for a long time. It was one of his nameless compositions of two or three blocks of colors. I was looking at the big block of dark brownish grey that was divided by a dark brownish red horizontal line, while remembering his words that he wanted to make people cry while standing in front of his paintings. And I was watching and waiting, although for no particular moment. It was just myself giving way to the painting, the colors, the blocks, the darkness. I was wondering about how a color could make one cry. Then a very old thought came to mind. When I was a teenager and first encountering some philosophical and sociological proposals of the world and how it should be changed, with all of their arguments and contra-arguments, at one point I concluded for myself, since, obviously, none of the theoretical plans were working and all of them seemed to be too specific, too deterministic, that an "elastic" system must have been created – at the same time general and specific, one that would indeed carry in itself an idea of the whole (of the world, of the society), but at the same time, the one that would constantly be directly addressing an individual, whereas its elasticity would give him/her the space for individual choices. And all of a sudden I saw a portrait on that dark color block. I flinched. I stepped away. There was an en face dark head coming out of the canvas. We were facing each other. I moved back, toward the painting, to look closer for I thought I was imagining things. I looked away and then back at the canvas and it was still there. I realized that I was looking at myself. The canvas became a mirror. It was disturbing, as it wasn't reflecting my features or any of me that I had known in the mirror. Since it was a noncolor and nonpicture – just a contour, it wasn't suggesting any claims about myself. I was faced with an empty darkness of myself. I had no external or concrete claims about myself to contradict or agree with – in a word, to discuss. I was left alone. To myself. I was left only to observe at first, and be led by an internal impulse. But the impulse was not directed by any external ones, except for the impulse to watch. And the piece of art was offering that defamiliarized look at the inside of myself, at my own soul. Its abstract form that goes into its own absolute, into almost noncolor, into almost nonshape, into nothingness, was creating space potent with a new form, an internal one – the one that I may create while watching it – watching myself, until I reach the decision to re-create myself – to become, once again. And, it is a choice, because, in the living being, individuation is brought about by the individual itself (Simondon, 305). Full stop.

Vladana

p.s. In case anybody reads this and becomes curiously suspicious, the painting (which formal name I wouldn't know) is hanging in MET, just a few steps away from Damien Hirst's dead shark.

From Algorithm to Process: Striation and Smoothness in Computation

2010-05-13T12:39:00.000-07:00

Last night I talked about the main thrust of the essay I'm working on for the end of our class. It will primarily be a starting point in developing two terms: the algorithm-image and the process-image. I opened my talk last night with a quote from Cinema 2 in which Deleuze talks about how the expression of movement-images and time-images will not be developed any further with electronic media than by pre-existing cinematic forms. Instead electronic media will have to forge new affects and concepts in its own right.

"The new automatism is worthless in itself if it is not put to the service of a powerful, obscure, condensed will to art, aspiring to deploy itself through involuntary movements which none the less do not restrict it. An original will to art has already been defined by us in the change affecting the intelligible content of cinema itself: the substitution of the time-image for the movement-image. So that electronic images will have to be based on still another will to art, or on as yet unknown aspects of the time-image."

"What is important is that the cinematographic image was already achieving effects which were not like those of electronics, but which had autonomous anticipatory functions in the time-image as will to art. Thus Bresson's cinema has no need of computing or cybernetic machines; yet the 'model' is a modern psychological automaton, because it is defined in relation to the speech-act, and no longer, as before, by motor action (Bresson was constantly thinking about automatism)."

(Cinema 2, 266)

It is in this spirit that I wish to make an attempt at describing the qualities that are significant to artists and thinkers in their current and future engagement with computation in general and computed media in particular. Instead of focusing on the issues of subjective bodily experience as Hansen has argued, I would like to take the position that Delueze has proven to be most interested in, the artist-artwork relation. The terms algorithm-image and process-image will be developed from the examination of the affective and conceptual relations that artists and thinkers enter into in their engagement with computation. The rough distinctions between these two term are as follows:

Algorithm-Image: finite, closed and striated process.
A prime example which we talked about in class would be most of video game narrative. There are choices to be made yet these choices are limited and the final outcomes are predetermined and of a fairly small set.

Process-Image: open, able to implicate a continuous becoming.
There are not many examples of this. Yet, the fractal video I showed in class and Benjamin's example of data-moshing are images that implicate a specific process at work in computation. With and through these images a certain open-ended implication of a infinitely itterable procedure is affectively grasped. In fractal we are presented with a sequence of a single geometry repeated such that a infinite space can be easily imagined with each part necessarily engaged with and situated in a unique relation with the whole. In data-moshing we are shown a glimpse of the process by which movement images are in process. Striped of their unique frames, movement becomes a series of vectors. Movement as process and in process.

I will also examine what I find to be the true issues embedded in HCI. I believe that Lev Manovich's critique of HCI is merely a limited form of the essential issue. The issue of HCI is not that it is bound to a cinematic mode but that HCI is a layer of mediation that obscures the procedural essence of computation (Hansen, 34). The layer of metaphor that draws on many different forms of media and epistemological organizations work to mask the procedural relation between artists and computation. In order for computed media and concepts to express and implicate truly new affects and concepts it will be necessary for those engaged to have a intimate and honest relation to the processes in which they explore.

Felix, What Will Remain After All This?

2010-05-12T16:41:00.000-07:00

The following blog post is a description on the project I have presented during the class: "Felix, what will remain after all this ?" including some notes, background ideas and initial questions that led to the current shape of the project. "Felix, what will remain after all this ?" is an installation in the tradition of discursive art or relational aesthetics; one might also bring in the term peformativity to describe a specific type of gesture of the work.

The work is a commissioned piece by an art institution in Berlin within their recent exhibition series: "Gruppenbild" (Group picture): "Gruppen bild is a five-part exhibition series with the artists Karolin., Discoteca F. S., Azin., Ming. and Shirirn H. S. in the showroom of the n b k. The participating artists work with performance and spatial installations. Over the course of a year they will be giving form to this experiment in conjuction with curators Kathrin. and Sophie. In every artistic intervention, existing installations will be altered and new elements added to them. The contributions of the individual artists will thus give rise to a collective conceptual model."

Note: Who is Felix?
Felix is my dialog partner
Felix is a collective
Felix represents himself
Felix represents a group of artist and curators
Felix could be Felix Gonzales-Torres
Felix is a fictional character

The exhibition space 'showroom' is a white cube. I am planing to do an intervention in this room through placing a pack of posters in the middle of the galley space/ the room. The posters are there to be taken away by the visitors.

The front side to the poster shows an Image of the ground, an image of the same spot on which the pack is placed. On the image there is also a hand visible. The photos will be taken while the hand is moving. The hand is moving because it is writing on the ground: "Felix, what will remain after all this ?"

The image is a reference to: interaction with time and memory. The space is reflected in it literal manner. Site specificity.

The image is taken by a handy photo camera. The size is A2, it is B/W print.

The image of the text on the ground covers its own root. The image covers the truth, the narrative, the history of its own, of that spot. The spectator can not witness whether the text does exist in real or not. You must go through the process of unveiling; each spectator will help the process of enlighten the truth of that particular spot through taking each one layer, one poster.

Question:
what remains after an action?
what remains after an event?
what remains after an artwork?
what remains after after history?
what creates memory?
what carries history?

On the back of the posters there is a second element printed. It is a letter. A hand written letter, authored by me and addressed towards the character Felix. The content of the letter will reflect the notions of memory, love, the you, the me, the us, the I and revolutions. The style of the letter is basically conversational. It will include Felix's previous letters which he wrote to me, and my responses to those letters.

Note: In fact, this letter is a collage of conversations we had among the curators and artist contributors of "Gruppenbild". During the meetings/workshops we had we mainly discussed each artist contributors work and interest within the project as well the nature and process of "Gruppenbild" itself. Each meeting was recorded on a dat. recorder which will of use specially for within my work.

I am interested in the relation between the two binary phenomena’s that can be found in the exhibition/curatorial concept: ‘the collective’ and ‘the individual’; or the distinction between ‘individuality’ and ‘individuation’. I am interested to look at the collective within the individual. The fact that we/people are influenced by several other people, outsiders, throughout our life, or that we are influenced by history (which marks ‘collective consciousness’ or ‘collective memory’) is for me interesting to observe.

How do we filter this influences?

The juxtaposition of this observations on the field of ‘artistic practice’ as such and the question of artistic ‘position’ or the originality and singularity of artistic ‘approach’ is for me a question that I want to point out within my work.

“… I think more than anything else I’m just an extension of certain practices, minimalism or conceptualism, that I am developing areas I think were not totally dealt with. … I think we are part of a historical process and I think that this attitude that you have to murder your father in order to start something new is bullshit.” From Felix Gonzales-Torres – Etre Un Espion, Interview by Robert Storr.

The installation includes also a second part which does not relate fully to this site, so I will leave it out for now.

General reference:

Photo from June 2009 during the silent march of the Iranian Green Movement in protest against the coup d'état of the Iranian regime. This march and the following other marches in that gathered 3 millions people on the streets of Tehran marks a particular point within the Iranian political history.

During the following demonstrations and riots in Tehran the image of the death of Neda Agha Soltan became the symbol of those historical days. The government forbid for those days every journalist to work and to document the events and actions on the streets of Tehran. It was the citizen journalism that emerged. People with their mobile cameras took pictures and films that was the only material for people to witness that historical moment.

--A

Response to Bergson

2010-05-12T14:43:00.000-07:00

For me, most of the films that I have made have been extremely personal journeys and infused with much conscious memory and pure memory. Bergson states, “…there is no perception which is not full of memories.” My last film SHADOW BOXING was written specifically for my husband. I also wanted to tell a story with pictures that was beautiful and cinematic. Looking back, I can see that, the lead character was written as a combination of all the important male figures and/or relationships in my life. Honestly this whole piece was an example of me infusing my art with the past, present and future.

The story is a psychological journey about a man struggling with adulthood and intimacy and coming to terms with his life. Honestly, on a conscious level I was not even aware that this was what I was writing about? I just wanted to make a pretty short piece? To quote Bergson…”with the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experience.” I started writing the script by looking at old photographs of my husband from birth to adulthood. I can remember seeing a picture of him as a child, crying and wearing only one shoe. This image of a shoeless, lost child opens the film. I also had a creepy statue of the three, hear no evil, speak no evil, see no evil monkey’s, which greatly resonated with me at the time and also used this image in the film. The pictures and subject matter of this piece were all signs that recalled me to former images and themes in my life.

Anyhow, I have posted the trailer from my short below. Someone once described this piece to me as a film about memory and loss. One festival sent me a nice rejection letter and said that no matter how many times they watched the film they could not grasp what it was about. For me, it really is a journey about a man coming to terms with his past, present and future. When I was working on the film none of these themes were in the forefront of my mind. Now all of this seems very obvious to me and kind of strange that I was so unconscious to my own inner world. As my children would say, “By accident, but really on purpose.” In any case, the whole film has a dreamlike quality to it, which is fitting, because making it was a process of accessing unconscious memories and stringing together past, present and future.

Deirdre

Blueprints

2010-05-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

My project concerns the changing landscape of Jersey City. In the narrative, though, the issue is about the nature of the city itself. The increase of condos/skyscraper gated communities, hotels, office buildings seem to eliminate any heterogeneous spaces or assimilate them into a corporate milieu. The white-flight phenomenon becomes inverted: the suburbs are abandoned for the metropolis. With great urban projects come great security: the installation of surveillance cameras in the fringes of the financial district. In effect, the metropolis is a panopticon in progress.

In the narrative, the photographer, in a voiceover, speaks about the city and his own attempt to understand his sense of forced displacement, as he captures images of construction areas.

Raul Garcia

Telling A Story Without Telling A Story

2010-05-12T13:37:00.000-07:00

As I posted days ago, I’m interested in the audiovisual image as a way of learning and exploring my own story. I have been in this research since I arrive here. “Smell The Roses Now” is another attempt of digging in my own memories and using them as the trigger for learning and telling. In this opportunity my research was about the time in the image and the time content in the image. I wanted to work with long takes, with an image that is non-figurative and with a non-narrative structure.

The long take in documentary was my first interest. How can observation, almost contemplation tell a story. Nathaniel Dosky with Threnody (2004) and Ben Rivers with This is My Land (2006) are two authors that inspire me through this search. Even if I don’t achieve the complete sensibility necessary for the long shot (both in the shooting and in the editing) the process is more than important, is transformative. If I review my images from a few months ago they were almost snapshots, now I can wait, and wait.

The non-figurative image was the second exploration; in doing so I reviewed a lot of found footage and experimented with images of buildings as part of the piece that I’m going to show tonight. It could have worked but I didn’t really like it. Any way in which I could treat my images as found footage, how could I take them out of context? How could I liberate them from the pressure of representation? I believe that this goal is better achieved in my documentary.

Finally my big struggle was not having a narrative structure, my internal fight with the beginning, climax and end. I wanted the viewer to ask himself about what is happening, to complete, to assume in one point and doubt in the other. I wanted these images to trigger other memories and questions. It was difficult since at some point I wanted to tell a story. I felt the pain of not having a fixed narrative structure. I felt the pain of trying to find the rhythm in the images and sound without turning it into a simple documentary or, on the other hand, without being intentionally entropic.

Susana

Surface vs Depth: Images for Meditation

2010-05-12T13:36:00.000-07:00

posted by caldwell l.

Improv Comedy and Deleuze

2010-05-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

Early on in this course I became interested in linking Deleuze’s work to improvisational comedy, which I have been studying now for about a year and a half. Using Deleuze as a way to better understand Improv first occurred to me at the beginning of the class when we were discussing Nietzsche, and specifically the idea of a "new image of thought."

The mind itself that is used during an improv set creates a new way of thinking. It is a Group Mind, made up of all the performers on a team, which has no choice except to think immanently. There is no room for a priori notions. Even if every performer walks into the theatre with their own beliefs, once they got on stage this will be alleviated assuming they following one of the guiding principles of improvisation – “yes, and.” This rule ensures that a performer agrees to the reality of the world, and then contributes something of their own. With “yes, and” performers are able to agree quickly, and in doing so explore the world they have invented on the stage.

The task of the improviser while building a scene or a show is very similar to Sanford Kwinter’s description of Kafka’s writing: "The task of Kafka the writer was perhaps no different from that of “K.” the land-surveyor in The Castle or the accused in The Trial. It was, on the one hand, to chart the topography of this peculiar emergent world, to discover the laws of how things combine, and on the other, to trace by trial and error the mysterious principle of its functioning. But at the same time no sketch or figure is anywhere offered up, unless it be on of those deliberately scrambled and inscrutable images like the officer’s blueprints for the inscription apparatus in the Penal Colony. For in Kafka, the task is no longer to trace the visible form of the world by recourse to an external schema or representational mode, but to somehow espouse its very substance, to become of the world by becoming one with it" (107).

Improvisers have no choice but to live in the world that they create, since its creation is happening in the moment, on stage, in front of an audience. One of the attributes that I find most appealing in a strong performance is commitment to the scene. There is nothing that turns me off from a performance than ironic detachment. That is to say, when a performer doesn’t fully commit to the actions on stage, and rather than taking part in them, describes them in an attempt to get a cheap laugh. A note that is said constantly in classes and rehearsals is to make the scene more active. By making it active, we become one with the world in much the same way as Kwinter describes it. We are able to explore the world more fully, and are able to find the connections, trace the principals, and chart the topography of the world we have created from moment to moment, and from scene to scene.

A huge part of improv is about making connections. This happens on many levels of an improv set. At the theatre where I have been studying, another principle to scene work is called “game.” Simply put, it is the unusual pattern of behavior that is organically established within the scene, which is where the humor of the scene derives. Once the game is established it continues to be played throughout the scene. This does not mean that the game should lead the direction of the scene, in fact quite the opposite, the relationship between the characters should the direction of the scene, and the game will occur naturally.

Connections are not just found within the scenes, but in the set as a whole. The form that is primarily taught where I study is called the Harold. Quickly, the Harold is as follows:

1. Suggestion from the audience

2. Opening based on suggestion (this can be anything from a word pattern game, to monologues, to a sound and movement exercise) – all of the scenes that follow are rooted in this opening, this is where performers pull their initiations

3. Three separate scenes in which a game is established (again, all of which are rooted in the opening)

4. Second beats of those same three scenes with the same game heightened (second beats can either be the same characters at a different time, or an analogous scene with new character playing the same game … either way the game should be heightened)

5. Third beats, same scenes, very short, heightened further. Often times all the scenes will mesh into one during the third beats

As an audience member, I find that the most satisfying Harolds to watch are the ones where all three scenes seamlessly come together in the third beat. These connections are certainly not preconceived. They occur organically as the set becomes its own entity and are brought together through the group mind. This is an example of the smoothing out of a striated space, which I feel often leads to the most interesting art.

A great improv set has an aura about it that I have experienced in few other places. I believe it creates a new image, a virtual image. The beauty of comedy, and particularly improv, is that nothing is untouchable. We are able to work with taboo topics, and pair ideas, thoughts and images that ordinarily would not be combined. The outcome varies greatly, but at times it creates a virtual image and an interaction with that image that is unique for players and audience members alike.

-- Jake

Smoothing Out Striations: The Art of Cyprien Gaillard

2010-05-12T13:06:00.000-07:00

Tonight I'll be making a presentation on the work young French conceptual artist Cyprien Gaillard, whose practice includes video, performance, sculpture, photography and land art. I'll mainly be discussing his video art, which is what he's best known for, and its relationship to architecture, and how his work activates many concepts we've discussed throughout the semester, particularly pertaining to Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of the smooth and the striated.

You can read a recent essay by Gaillard in ArtForum, wherein he discusses his interest in modern ruins, and watch the following video, Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009), his second-most famous work to date (I'll be discussing his best-known as well, which only exists online in impoverished snippets, but you may have seen at the New Museum last year in The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, and is discussed at great length here). I will also show it in class this evening. See you then.

-Ben Sutton

Hansen and Machine Identity

2010-05-12T12:34:00.001-07:00

In the last post I wrote that Hansen believes that “the digital does not alter us (à la Kittler) but instead extends and reflects us”. I’d like to take this post to revise this statement and investigate the status of machines in Hansen’s theories through his writings on Paul Virilio and Friedrich Kittler (who’s work I have unfortunately never read, so I will have to take Hansen’s relaying of his opinions at face value). Although I don’t think that this revision will change my argument about Hansen’s relationship to Bergson, I do think that the machine has more complicated status in his writings than I initially stated.

Kittler (according to Hansen) believes that we have entered a post-human era. This has occurred because of machines’ position in creating human perceptions through the translation of information into human stimuli. (Hansen 71-78) Humans’ received stimuli from machines constitute “the purely contingent by-product of a preparatory phase in the evolution of information toward fully autonomous circulation.” (Hansen 77) Humans passively sit, receiving the various leftovers of stimuli, which are tacked on to the endless passing on of information between machines. In response to this Hansen posits, through the writings of several theorists, that meaning and information cannot be separated. For Hansen all things contain within themselves an “equipotentiality,” an inherent element which relates to and derives meaning from that which created it. In a confusing twist though, the human seems to have escaped this chain and exerts/creates meaning for both the machine (which emerged from it) and the organic (from which it emerged). Hansen recruits Raymond Ruyer to his argument, quoting him as saying, “If the physical world and the world of machines were left completely to themselves, everything would spontaneously fall into disorder; everything would testify that there had never been true order, consistent order, in other words, that there had never been information.” (82) Unlike in Uexküll’s writings, where different meanings exist in the world for different life forms, for Hansen the world exists as chaos without the human. (As a side note, to me the use of the phrase “true order” in this quote is a perfect illustration of a post-enlightenment attempt to fill the void created by god’s absence with human agency.) Therefore, even if humans only receive a portion of the information contained within the machine, all that information is tinged with its equipotentiality, its potential use by its ultimate creator: the Human. On page 82 Hansen writes, “those, like Kittler, who posit an autonomy of the digital simply have things backward: if ‘the digital’ poses a danger, it is the danger of a false, not a real autonomy—the danger that cybernetics will forget the human (and the biological) basis of information.” This position, that the danger lies in a false autonomy of the digital, leads us to Hansen’s writings on Virilio.

Hansen frames Virilio as working within his humanist tradition. Using Virilio’s concept of the “vision machine” Hansen identifies a potential split between human and mechanical perception. On page 103 Hansen summarizes Virilio’s position as, “what we face in today’s vision-machines is the threat of total irrelevance: because our bodies cannot keep pace with the speed of (technical) vision, we literally cannot see what the machines can see, and we thus risk being left out of the perceptual loop all together.” (103) From this Hansen concludes that we must bring the machine back to the human body, or risk losing our significance. What is completely astounding to me is that this precise process, whereby the human is phased out or becomes irrelevant, is the same process that he has so firmly insisted is not taking place in his response to Kittler. One can reasonably ask how machines can both simply contain empty patterns of information waiting for human embodiment, and simultaneously be a vision-machine with its own (autonomous) non-human way of perceiving the world. We are left with two competing visions of machines, as either active agents (or combatants for Hansen) or as passive tools that extend the human perception. The digital is either a battleground in which the human fights for relevance, or a playground where the human revels in his or her own agency. I would argue that it could be one or the other, or neither, but certainly not both.

It strikes me that Virilio’s writings are much closer to Kittler’s than Hansen’s. Virilio sounds almost identical to Kittler when he writes in The Accident of Art that with digital technology “we are faced with the failure of the analogical in favor of calculation and numerology of the image. Every sensation is going to be digitized or digitalized. We are faced with the reconstruction of the phenomenology of perception according to the machine. The vision machine is not simply the camera that replaces Monet’s eye… now it’s a machine that’s reconstructing sensations pixel by pixel “(65-66). This is the state of the contemporary vision-machine for Virilio, which has effectively extended itself beyond the domain of just vision and into all sensation. In The Accident of Art Virillio argues that only through catastrophic accidents, caused by a combination of mechanic disinterest in the human, and the growing significance and might of mechanization in our society, will we ever acknowledge our own growing irrelevance.(109) Through the process of globalization and the invention of the simultaneous broadcast we are constantly hitting the refresh button on a presumed knowledge of the present at the detriment of our sense of the future and the past.(Virilio98-102) Due to our fascination with what we falsely think of as an extension of our perception, which now encompasses the entire world, we miss the fact that we are giving over our sensations to machines.

On page 105, Hansen concludes from Virilio’s writings that “If we now regularly experience a ‘pathology of immediate perception’ in which the credibility of visual images has been destroyed, isn’t the reason simply that image-processing has been dissociated from the body? And if so, what better way can there be to resist the industrialization of perception than by reinvesting the bodily basis of perception?” What Hansen misses here is that Virilio agrees with Kittler regarding the autonomy of machines. For Virilio, machines exist outside human meaning and that machines pursue different goals than those prescribed by their equipotentiality. The “right to blindness” is not a call to turn over the other sensations of the body to the machine through an emphasis on human activity in the digital, but to turn away from the digital with our limbs as well as our eyes.

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Self As Medium

2010-05-09T20:27:00.000-07:00

It is interesting how issues concerning embodied perception and materiality paradoxically increase in importance as media objects become increasingly virtual and bodiless. Case in point, the contentious claims within Mark B.N. Hansen’s book, which for me recalled the work of other media theorists attempting to explain our interactions with new media forms as being tied intrinsically to the self – or ‘body’ – as a kind of indeterminate experiential device.

In New Philosophy for New Media, Hansen argues that digital media present a new form of engagement with imagery by shifting the viewer's primary experience of visual perception from optics to "affectivity," or felt responses, located specifically within the body.[i] I appreciate that his work is a radical departure from the common (dismissive) assumption that digital media lack "humanness" or fixed authenticity because of their disembodied nature as fluid sets of data. The book's analysis of an admittedly limited selection of new media artworks provides excellent illustration of his thesis.

Yet I came away from Hansen’s book with similar questions as I had after reading Guiliana Bruno’s Atlas of Emotion, which argues that cinematic space enables haptic ‘traveling’ experiences in which we navigate through complex emotional/psychological terrain.[ii] While both present interesting arguments, they dilute their applicability by using the concepts of "body" and "affectivity" in generalized, homogenous terms. In placing aesthetic experience of the digital realm inside 'the body,' Hansen does not specify where in the body these perceptions occur other than that they are simply not (only) visual. The artworks he profiles offer examples of aural, tactile, and physiological responses (e.g., sense of balance/horizon), but he does not acknowledge the diversity of potential corporeal responses within those broad categories except to say that our elicited responses can be heterogenous. More often, Hansen presents ‘affectivity’ as a given absolute that is inevitable and has no varying degrees. As in: You see a digital image, but it’s the affectivity within your Body that frames it.

Is this reading too simplistic? N. Katherine Hayles, by contrast, offers more specificity – or at least acknowledges the potential diversity of human affective response. In her book, How We Became Posthuman, she explores the history of cybernetic thought using examples from popular fiction and literature to augment her critique of the much-exalted concept of disembodied information. Distinguishing between ‘the body’ as a Platonic idealized form and ‘embodiment’ as a catch-all term for culturally constructed practices enacted on the individual level, Hayles points out that most theorists focus on the ideal/body concept because it is easier to abstract than individual instantiations of embodiment.[iii]

Hansen’s work addresses important questions at this moment in history. I just wonder if his follow-up work (or that of other theorists) will offer more specifics concerning the exact nature and quality of aesthetic experience beyond the idealized ‘sense of self’ that seems to have more in common with new-age pop psychology than with rigorous philosophical inquiry.

--Noelia

[i] Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2004.

[ii] Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion. New York: Verso, 2002.

[iii] Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. pps. 195-199.

Film Shoot

2010-05-09T09:06:00.000-07:00

Last week I worked on a film shoot that documented a person’s entire day – from 5 AM on Thursday morning until 5 AM on Friday morning. The shoot took place during the subject and filmmaker’s birthday. The idea came from James Joyce’s Ulysses, in which every chapter is a new hour of the day, and so for every hour we had a new cinematographer come and film him. The same thing was happening with his wife and son, so we had at least three cameras going at all times.

I was in charge of making sure that the handoff of shooters happened smoothly. We tried to make the transition as smooth as possible. While Camera A was shooting the subject I would prep Camera B and give it to the next cinematographer. At the turn of the hour Camera B would shoot Camera A for one minute, at which point Camera A would turn to Camera B, Camera B would turn to the subject, and Camera A would be turned off.

Although we tried to make these transitions smooth, the time-based nature of it made the day full of striation. This was in part a technical necessity (batteries and SD cards cannot shoot for 24 hours), and also an artistic choice. Being the person who was in charge of these quick changes I became uncomfortably aware of the time. For a full day, every hour became an ordeal for me, an event. Sometimes these events were more stressful than others (did people show up on time, are we in the middle of the city, how many empty SDs cards do I have in my pocket right now), but they all happened with the same amount of time in between. I was affected when I finally tried to go to sleep by popping my head up on the hour, expecting to have to do something. My body had become used to the rhythm.

The inevitable outcome of the piece, was that it became a film about making a film, rather than an average day (which is what was expected). Of course, the subject is a filmmaker, so the nature of the day is not entirely unusual. One thing that I really noticed about the piece was how it brought together a community. With 45 shooters come in and out over the course of the day -- all of whom were somehow connected to the filmmaker, and most of whom were artists – I watched the world that surrounded him meld together. Many of the shooters would have three shifts (one on each subject) with an hour break in between each one, so they would be around for 5+ hours. People would hang out at the house on break, and stay late, as a community of artists gathered. I found the scene very inspiring.

One of my moments of the day was when all three subjects (as well as their three shooters) were in the backyard. Mom and Dad followed closely as their 14-month-old son ran around the yard. Once the shooters had their angles they stayed close as well. So the outcome was 6 people moving in unison, all moving in rhythm as a cohesive unit, as a toddler led the way kicking a ball as he went.

-- Jake

Seeing With the Body

2010-05-08T14:53:00.000-07:00

The beginning of Seeing with the Body was quite promising to me. Such was, for example, the part that says that "the perspective from which the [digital] picture is taken is, in relation to human perception, wholly arbitrary…" Being aware that Hansen was going to talk about the embodiment of the data and a shift from the eye to the body, I expected more than a praise of the interactive quality of video installations. (True, I might still be missing some of his points.) In that sense, if we do not rely on or directly draw from our eye, that is, from our visual perception and thus we do not exclusively depend on what we can see as reality, that means that some other sensors' percepts can be released, even liberated, and then, through them, so called ontological and epistemological questions can be (re)raised - from a potentially new perspectives, possibly yet unknown. The relationship between the concrete and the abstract is another thing that is for me implicitly raised in the basis of this text. In a situation of a person that is making a completely digital picture or a video (meaning - starting from a blank screen of the computer, without any pre-recorded footage) the body - its impulses and sensations become completely abstracted and turned into data. At the same time, through that "body that creates" the data themselves become concretized, sensory perceptible and not only abstract binary codes anymore. When this is put next to the questions of mortality, transience, beauty, knowledge, God, Devil, and so on, what happens? Does this "interaction" between the body and the data change some of our old answers and insights? Or not at all? ...These were the promised questions that I saw somewhere at the beginning of reading Hansen. For, the fact that there is an interaction, that is, the acknowledgement that my body does react and that moving images (be they analog or digital) or any kind of exteriority can make my body react (and vice versa) doesn't make me think much further. The same goes for the type of art that Shaw is making. It is certainly not enough to have a repetition of a set of everyday actions moved to an art gallery. The Web of Life, for example, carries a very interesting and potent idea – scanning a palm for which there is a belief that has the whole destiny of its owner inscribed on itself, then copying the destiny and abstracting it – turning it into binary codes, which are again concretized into images and/or sounds, which are themselves abstract… then somehow making these transformations perceptible within the very art piece that itself formally combines the abstract and the concrete… for example… But once again, it remained on the level of only an idea of having a palm scanned and then watching some images that are, in the least, ugly.

Vladana

Hansen, Virtual Reality and Video Games

2010-05-07T06:04:00.000-07:00

During our discussion on Wednesday one of the major shortcomings we found in Mark B. N. Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media (2006) was the absence of any engagement with video games. This struck us as especially problematic since his whole project seemed to be a consideration of the ways that qualitatively new media allow us to engage with them in an affective, embodied manner, and this certainly sounds like the kind of experience we have whenever we play a video game, be it an old coin-operated Pacman arcade game or a brand new Wii game at home or World of Warcraft on a computer. Surely Hansen would not be able to liken this activity to the so-called "enforced passivity" of the cinema that he seems so resolved to criticize. But then how would he be able to maintain a distance (as he would presumably want to do) between the work of Jeffrey Shaw that he is so committed to, and something like Second Life, Halo, or even Tetris? I think we might extract and extrapolate some (relatively positive) evaluation of video games from Hansen's critique of Liev Manovich's The Language of the New Media (2001), and the treatment of virtual reality (VR) therein, near the end of chapter one of New Philosophy for New Media.

In this passage Hansen criticizes Manovich's evaluation of VR for failing to fully take into account the embodied experience of the user during and despite the experience of being also virtually embodied, or virtualized. He asks: "Can the reality effect of telepresence be understood without an account of the physicality of the virtualized body?" (40-41) He suggests, in other words, that new media such as VR enable the user to be doubly embodied, both in the "original" space of the virtualizing interface or console and within the virtual world, in a digitized body. While Manovich suggests that the latter nullifies the former for the duration of the VR experience, Hansen argues that both must be partial and simultaneous, leading him to propose what seems a very radical (and very Deleuzian) realignment of the conventional opposition between representation and simulation, one that can be useful for constructing a Hansenian theory of the video game. He writes of Manovich: "the example of telepresence underscores the limitations of his general distinction between representation and simulation and suggests the necessity of triangulating this binary with a third term, namely, hallucination (by which I mean... that the embodied mind actually creates what it sees)" (41, emphasis original). One final quotation (in which we might substitute "video game" for "VR" to fully understand how these comments apply to the former medium): "that explains the capacity for the VR interface to couple our bodies with (almost) any arbitrary space, and not just spaces that are contiguous with the physical space we happen to occupy or even spaces like those we typically occupy" (41). This triangulating, hallucinatory property that Hansen invests in VR can very easily be seen as the starting point for his (perhaps surprisingly positive) evaluation of video games.

Video games, like VR, must then trigger this phenomenon of being in a doubly embodied, hallucinatory state, activating a virtualized world while still remaining an affective body within the world of the gaming interface. Certainly the increasingly frequent appearance of artist-designed video games in art spaces corroborates this characterization. In the exhibition The Generational: Younger Than Jesus at the New Museum last year, video game artist Mark Essen presented a game of his called Flywrench (2007), in which the player uses a controller to navigate a flying wrench through a series of increasingly labyrinthine spaces while trying to keep the fragile object from shattering. The unique telepresence of this game takes us to an environment that is certainly not "like those we typically occupy," requiring us to assume the position of a typically inanimate object (a wrench) endowed with the superhuman ability of flight. Playing the game, however, also meant standing in a museum gallery (there was no seating, perhaps to discourage visitors for hogging the one controller for too long) surrounded by other visitors, some of whom might be watching you play, hearing sounds from nearby installations and videos. Perhaps not an ideal gaming environment, the Flywrench installation illustrated Hansen's phenomena of triangulation and hallucination in a decidedly active, rather than passive, setting.

An installation at last spring's Offf Festival by the Spanish design firm Multitouch Barcelona pushed this capacity for simultaneous, multiple embodiments to the extreme, creating a wall-sized projection of the vintage arcade game Space Invaders (see video at the end of this post). Gallery-goers played the game not by pushing buttons on a controller or joystick, but by throwing projectiles like tennis balls at the projected images on the wall, where a sensory surface detected the hit, destroying the enemy ship, if there was one, in that spot. Anything but passive, this throwing game has the further advantage of being a multi-player experience, adding a sense of temporary, communal embodiment very different from the solitary VR experience that Hansen describes.

Another video game artist, Erik Svedang, has created a very immersive, but just as graphically simple gaming environment called Pixel Cave Adventure (2007, pictured at top), in which gamers play within a small cube surrounded by four screens, directing a small human figure who moves around the panoramic maze surrounding the player. Parallels to the work of Jeffrey Shaw, as discussed by Hansen, are inevitable, though here the simultaneity of embodiments is perhaps more extreme, allowing the gamer to control a solitary humanoid character while at the same time having to move and turn around in the claustrophobic space of the gaming cube.

These examples of how we might imagine Hansen's hallucinatory theory of VR being applied to video games all involve site-specific installations, but a simpler game that exists online for free might demonstrates the VR-video game analogy as well. First-Person Tetris begins much like the original game, presenting the gamer with a vertical, rectangular space and falling blocks that must be arranged to create solid lines. The space of the game is surrounded by a conventional living room setting with television, carpeting, a houseplant and video game console. But as the pieces move downwards so does the entire screen. Rotating pieces to fit them into the increasingly complex geometric gaps makes the entire screen rotate. As the game's title suggests, we are challenged to assume the point of view of these abstract blocks of forms and color, a perspective that stands in sharp contrast to our embodied presence in front of a computer screen. Aside from provoking a surprisingly acute sense of Hansen's hallucinatory double embodiment, First-Person Tetris is liable to provoke nausea, pushing our capacity to inhabit both the virtualized and physical spaces at once nearly to its breaking point. Such innovative video games offer extremely interesting and promising activations of Hansen's concept of multiple embodiments and the hallucinatory relation between representation and the virtual in VR. Though he never addresses the potential of video games for triggering qualitatively new experiences and embodiments, we can surmise of his engagement with VR that he may have identified a surprisingly optimistic potential in this new medium.

-Ben Sutton

Here is a short video of the interactive, wall-sized Space Invaders projection by Multitouch Barcelona at the 2009 Offf Festival:

Smooth Space, Becoming and the Aesthetic of Migration

2010-05-06T17:17:00.000-07:00

The following is a chapter taken from a textual framework I am recently working on. This work tempts to elaborate the notion of ‘The Aesthetic of Migration’ that I understand as the (non) logic of my cultural practice (includes artistic practice, educational work and political activity). In this chapter I tried to create points of references to contextualize the phenomena of ‘migration’. In the later chapters it will be visible how ‘The Aesthetic of Migration’ can transform itself into practice.

The overall Essay is structured in seven chapters:
The first valley, valley of quest: Where are we?
The second valley, valley of Love: Theory and practice
The third valley, valley of understanding: Migration
The fourth valley, valley of Independence and Detachment: Aesthetics
The fifth valley, valley of Unity: Practicing Culture: Art, Education and Politics
The sixth valley, valley of Astonishment and Bewilderment: A Collective Memory
The seventh valley, valley of Deprivation and Death: Better not to use words!

The title of each chapter refers to the poem “Manteq aṭ-ayr” (the parliament of the birds) from 1206, by Attār, a Persian poet and theoretician of Sufism:
Led by the hoopoe, a group of birds travel through seven valleys in search of their King Simurgh. At the end of the road, only thirty birds accomplish to reach the last valley. But there is no Simurgh anywhere to see. The birds Experience extreme sadness and dejection after the difficult travel they had behind, they feel that they know nothing, understand nothing. They are not even aware of themselves. Simurgh's chamberlain, the hoopoe, keeps them waiting for long time. Until, the birds recognize that they themselves are the si (thirty) murgh (bird):

The third valley, valley of understanding: Migration
On the very basic level of understanding, migration describes a movement of people, objects or organism (like birds) from one space to another. There are various types of migration movements I believe: physical, mental or virtual. On our site, the context of the term migration will be the human being. Later on the road we will also discover a theory of how the migration of objects and forms can be understood, specially in context of film space.

Migration is less characterized by temporality – in term of holidaying or residing temporally in a new place. Although I fully agree that temporality is one of various conditions of Migration. Temporality exists within migration, but migration itself is not a temporal phenomena. In my opinion the global discourse of migration is poorly limited to social, economical and political issues, which do not provide us a complete framework of migration, that’s why we will here seek to embrace migration from a formal-aesthetical, philosophical and psychological entrance. Reasons of migration such as the economical, social and political circumstances of a place are the conditions for the process of decision making of people when they want to migrate.

When does the process of migration starts and when does it end? One element of migration is disregarding borders; can we approach migration in a way that goes beyond pre-defined academic or social-political narratives?

I want to suggest an intellectual-experiential space of migration as form of engagement with the phenomena migration. I believe that the experience of migration itself creates a particular understanding of life, which we can’t deny its current existence. Through elaborating my practices and through the so-called theoretical investigation of the matter, I want to manifest this particular understanding I call ‘the aesthetic of migration’; which understands migration as a space of mind, rather as social-political phenomena.

So what is the experience of migration? And how does it lead to a space of mind? And what does migration have something to do with the aesthetics?

Before I narrate what the meaning of my thoughts are, let me bring an example which can metaphorically prepare the climax of our shared thoughts: In a conversation between Walter Murch and Michael Ondatje (from ‘The Conversations – Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film) Murch suggests a space which he calls as the three dimensional space which is for me a concrete analogy to what I call migration-space or assimilation process: “… Your left eye sees one thing and your right sees something else, a slightly different perspective. They're so close and yet different enough that when the mind tries to see both simultaneously, to resolve their contradictions, the only way it can do so is to create a third concept, an arena in which both perspectives can exist: three-dimensional space. This "space" doesn't exist in either of the images–each eye alone sees a flat, two-dimensional view of the world–but space, as we perceive it, is created in the mind's attempt to resolve the different images it is receiving from the left and the right eye.” 1

Linguists claim that language is the first and most crucial element, that creates the logic of each person’s way of thinking. Architects are (ideally) aware on the influence of their suggested building on the physical behavior and daily life movement of the urban citizen’s, as any cook is extremely sensitive on the culture of taste and aliment, which s/he establishes through his/her food. The language, architecture and taste/sense of each place creates a particularity which we call culture.

So what happens when someone with a particular culture migrates to a new place, to a new home, to a new environment that has its own logic of thinking, tastes and architecture? He will assimilate and he must embrace the new culture. Also in the case of resistance towards the new culture (it happens often when migration takes place unwillingly), one will unconsciously assimilate her/himself to the conditions of the new environment, at least on the surface level.

Homi K. Bhabha, in a public discussion in 2003 on “Defining ‘Home’: Divided Loyalty or Dual Loyalty”, said: "We don’t get to define where we come from. We are defined by where we come from. … We carry where we came from through the stories we tell and the food we cook. The most important thing is to be able to bring these things to a new home and combine them without losing the sense of their uniqueness”. Further he said that “Assimilation is futile” and he resulted that “The best outcome is when a host culture adopts the culture of its new residents, becoming like a millefait.”2 Bhabha, Professor of English and American Literature at Harvard University, related his experience as a Zoroastrian Parsee raised in Bombay by Jesuits, educated in England and now working in America to reference his arguments as it is recorded from the meeting.

Bhabha’s quote does not contradict to the fact that the process of assimilation and transformation is a crucial part of experiencing migration. In every circumstances, whether in the case of right wing integration legislations in Germany or in the case of states such as New York which is defined by many emigrational movements, the transformation of language, physical/mental behavior, tastes/senses keeps being a crucial experience. Based on what Bhabha claims, assimilation can happen both for those who move and for those who host their culture. It is also important to know that I do not disvalue assimilation as a traumatic experience or loss – again with regard and agreement to Bhabha I believe that one is able to carry her/his culture also after migration, if not only carry, getting more conscious and reflective upon it – rather I claim that the experience of assimilation and conscious reflection upon it can be a potential for a particular productive way of intellectual-practical engagement with the world. You may want to stop me here and say that this is not new knowledge; I say, yes, you are right, but let me explain how the experience of migration can be used as a form of engagement, a form of criticism and resistance towards (administrative) rationalism and (political) central perspective.

Through experiencing the process of assimilation we might get to a special way of looking/viewing things, to a particular state of mind which would disagree with the frontal view on object/subject rather leaving spaces for shifts to the right as well to the left. One might call this dynamic ambiguity. Yet this space is related to the poetical or the surreal as a political gesture. But there are also other terms and theoretical models we can use for it, such as ‘smooth’ or ‘becoming’:

Now, for you, I am going to link concepts from western philosophical thought to the kind of experiences one will have while going through assimilation processes. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari known for seeking thought throughout the body of their collaborative philosophical work on the model of ‘becoming’ – as an opposite to the notion of ‘being’ – did suggested a space named as the ‘smooth space’ within their major philosophical work: “A Thousand Plateaus”. Deleuze/Guattari investigate in the chapter “The Smooth and the Striated” basically two forms of spaces which they put, in the first glance, in two binary conditions: ‘smooth’/striated’. Further they suggest also ‘nomad space and sedentary space’ and ‘the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus’.3 Deleuze and Guattari characterize the ‘smooth’ as a space, which is ‘occupied by intensities and events.’ The ‘smooth’ is haptic rather optic. It is vectorial, like a sea, steppe, ice and desert. For me a very crucial metaphoric description of Deleuze and Guattari, (that made me secure to use the concept of the ‘smooth’ as a link to migration-mind), is their claim that: the ‘smooth space’ is occupied by packs and nomads. As we recognized earlier, the migrant has another understanding on the notion of ‘border’ because s/he must psychologically deny the border to be able to decide for movement. So do Deleuze/Guattari understand the ‘smooth’; they explain the ‘smooth’ as a texture of “traits” consisting of variations of free action. The characteristic experience of ‘smooth’ space exist without any visual model for points of reference or invariant distances, and exactly this characteristic is the link to the experience of assimilation that results in multi-perspectival and multi-dimensional understanding of the world. But if we inhabit the ‘smooth’ as a constant totalitarian space we will find ourselves in contradiction with the concept itself which Deleuze/Guattari are providing us; so we would disagree with the model of ‘becoming’ and also with migration as a state of mind: “… we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated spaces; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space.” 4

To create an ontological path of Deleuze/ Guattari’s work, it is important to mention that the notion of ‘becoming’ for Deleuze and Guattari arrives at the very immediate moment of the ‘Death of God’ and the question we ask ourselves: ‘How might one live?’ Taking this question and occupying the immanence as their playground, Deleuze and Guattari provide us the model of opposing the being: ‘form Thinking’ with becoming: ‘Casual Thinking’. They do so in which they claim that Human being is the result of processes and it is always in the process of becoming, becoming the other, becoming animal through being influenced by the other and the environment. This means that we are constantly in the process of assimilation and transformation. We carry our cultures with us and interlink them with the new culture we get confronted with everyday. ‘The aesthetic of migration’ is a practice, which creates ‘smooth spaces’. ‘The aesthetic of migration’ creates a space through which one will have the ability to look on the matter in a multi-dimensional manner. ‘The aesthetic of migration’ is an aesthetic in which not the ‘being’ (form thinking) exists, rather the ‘becoming’.

1.Michael Ondaatje, The conversations: Walter Murch and the Arts of Editing Film (Alfred A. Knopf New York, 2008) (p. 209-210)
2.World Economic Forum web page, Defining "Home": Divided Loyalty or Dual Loyalty
(http://www2.weforum.org/site/knowledgenavigator.nsf/Content/Defining%20_Home__%20Divided%20Loyalty%20or%20Dual%20Loyalty_20037cef.html?open)
3.Gilles Deleuze / Felix Guattari, A thousand platteaus (University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, London) (14.1440: The Smooth and the Striated / p.474)
4.Gilles Deleuze / Felix Guattari, A thousand platteaus (University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota, London) (14.1440: The Smooth and the Striated / p.474)

Azin

Hansen Critique Part 2: The Virtual (a no-man’s land)

2010-05-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

Having established the argument that Hansen is moving towards a specifically human centered embodiment I would like to take a closer look at how he thinks that someone like Jeffrey Shaw is able to exemplify precisely what he finds to be missing from Deleuze’s analysis of Bergson. To do this I would first like to look at how Hansen understands “the virtual.” He explains that, “the virtual must be understood as that capacity, so fundamental to human existence, to be in excess of one’s actual state.” (51) The virtual, thus signifying “that capacity” (or more precisely “capacity” itself) which is beyond the “actual state” of our embodied selves.

Hansen explains that it is because Shaw’s work is able to “deploy technology as a means to elicit or trigger the virtual” (51) that it is in step with Bergsonian philosophy. In the case of new media arts, and more specifically with Shaw’s work, Hansen understands the technologies as that which will help to expand and extend “the capacity” of the embodied human subject. In other words, he understands new media technologies and practices to be that which can open up our human and embodied “capacity” to be in the world (to become with the world?).

The problem that I see here is that, where Hansen thinks that “Deleuze disembodies the Bergsonist conception of the center of indetermination in order to equate it with the function of the cinematic frame” (52), I think that Deleuze does not “disembody” the center of indetermination, but instead favors (and to an extent tries to embody) the zone/interval of indetermination which, for him, exist in time and movement and can be explored and perhaps even exploded through the potential of the cinematic frame. What I mean by this is that, whereas Hansen reinvests the “center of indetermination” (or the human body) with control and mastery over the frame (and ultimately over framing “the virtual”), Deleuze attempts to reinvest in the “in-between” (in the gap, interval, zone of indetermination), which ultimately renders the human body into a deeper immanent relationship with the virtual. On the one hand, this does somehow “disembody” the individual, but that seems like it is the whole point. For Deleuze, it is about going “beyond individual” (super-human), and not instead about trying to re-power “the human individual” with control over framing the virtual.

I think perhaps I may have bitten off more than I can chew here, but ultimately I get a feeling that with the Hansen, there is less of a focus on the fluidity of the relationship between the body and the new media technologies and more of an attempt at restoring the human body as master in the struggle between increasingly amorphous information and our desire to control it.

Vanessa Meyer

Hansen Critique Part I: Em(human)bodiment

2010-05-05T16:53:00.000-07:00

This first section, of my two-part attempt at a critique of Mark Hansen’s “New Philosophy for New Media,” stems from a confusion regarding his understanding of embodiment. In the second section, I will turn to look more deeply at how this is reflected in his critique of Deleuze. I should note that I have tried to get through his entire text 2 years ago and was unsuccessful and thoroughly confused. Upon my second reading I can now say that while certain things are a lot clearer, there are others that have become much more opaque.

It seems as though Hansen is trying to, as explicated by Tim Lenoir, “reclaim Bergson’s understanding of embodiment in an account of how the body “enframes” information.” (xx) In addition to this, he emphasizes the specifically digital nature of new media information and explains that it is because of the ‘digital nature’ of this information that it can be conceived of as so malleable and fluid. Taking from Bergson, Hansen is thus trying to formulate a conception of new media, which because of the “fluidity” of the information, places the body at the center- subsequently restoring the power and control over the “framing of the information” to the human subject; “[…] media convergence under digitality actually increases the centrality of the body as framer of information; as media lose their material specificity, the body takes on a more prominent function as selective processor in the creation of images.” (xxii)

Taking into consideration the phenomenological approach that he is employing, I nonetheless maintain that it is important to notice the humanistic kind of empowerment that his argument brings to “the body”. In his case, as I see it (and I could very well be wrong), the kind of embodiment described is one that appears to be necessarily human. Hansen seems to be saying that, in opposition to what Deleuze explicates, new media is able to restore some kind of active (affective) relationship between the “passively correlating individual” and “performed images,” in such a way that their relationship develops into one that is fully embodied and immanent (becoming)- i.e. the human body being responsible for selectively framing the fluid information.

My question though, is whether this kind of “becoming” (and this kind of “detached embodiment”) is really what Deleuze was speaking about. I am not sure if I am mixing it all up but I feel as though Deleuze was not concerned with centering the human subject as embodied controller and master framer of information and instead encouraged a less dominant role on the part of the human body (characterizing the body as that which is not only in constant relation with the media that surround it, but with the world in its entirety, and subsequently the world itself being in constant relation with the body, so much so that “the human body” loses it’s dominant position.) I am going to end with this question for now and continue on with this argument in my next post….hopefully things will become clearer.

- Vanessa Meyer

Are Our Bodies Mediums of the Digital?

2010-05-05T16:38:00.000-07:00

One of the theses that Hansen supports in “Between Body and Image” is that the digital needs our bodies to exist “an embodied aesthetics of the digital” and that this is the newest of the new media. Ones wonder: is he claiming is that the human beings are the mediums of the digital? Can a dog be also a medium of the digital? This is pretty intriguing for me. First of all it seems to be radical, because when we cease to exist or just when we are not there the digital expires? Secondly I find this statement opposite to Frampton´s, who defined film as a thinking entity by its own.

I am not convinced about Hansen´s postulate I not quite convinced that our bodies are the materiality of the digital media. Any way a Brazilian artist gives me some elements to think further about it.

Luiz DuVa in his audiovisual installation “Suspensao” plays with the elements that Hansen is highlighting. DuVa performances as a VJ only occurs once, each exhibition of the same images will be different, since he works with real time cutting of the images. According to the artist this installation goes one step further that his previous experiments with video and embedded sound. It has two video channels and sound in four channels that is mixing or aggregating in real time until the moment of the suspension of one body. The sound comes from the samplers embedded in the images. He explains that the computer “hears” the sound that the moving images produces and cuts from one image to another. In short, he works with the video and the cuts are executed by the sound that the images produce. It makes me think about an hybrid human- machine and in some extend supports Hansen’s arguments “Suspensao” only exists in that specific moment when the artist is mixing, and when the audience is experiencing it. But at the same time it exists in the image of the images of this performance, and in the idea of the author that is not necessarily our bodies or his body.

Other elements link this author with the idea of the embodiment and the digital image. The scene has bilateral screens and the author in the middle, as part of the image, as an extension of the image. DuVa Claims that as VJ he wanted to create “an atmosphere with expanded image and distended time and space” he experiments his multilayer screen trying to transcend the limits of the screen borders, and trying to explore the space between the eye and the screen.
Susana

http://videolog.uol.com.br/video.php?id=277185

References:
Interview to Luiz DuVa at:
http://rraurl.com/cena/3370/Do_audio_video_da_quarta_onda_e_da_suspensao

The Whitney, Alone and Together

2010-05-05T15:44:00.001-07:00

Perhaps because I was so completely taken by the Marina Abramovic exhibit at MoMA last week - I'm still thinking about it and still bring it up in conversation with friends back in California - I found it difficult to process all of the information thrown at me at the Whitney Museum's Biennial show last Friday, April 30th. Only almost a week later have I been able to reflect on what I had seen and what struck me and remained imprinted on my memory.

I showed up at the museum equipped with the knowledge of one, maybe two of the artists whose work was on display, completely unfamiliar with the rest of the pieces and the artists in the show and completely unassuming in what to expect. I'd heard a lot of hype, namely that this year's show was the best in ages, but digesting this hype felt similar to times when friends have told me that a film is "amazing" or "hilaaarious!" - I knew that expecting too much could potentially disappoint. I suppose that since this show is supposed to be the show that features the next big stars of the art world I should have done a bit more research - but honestly, wandering the labyrinth of temporary walls and installations with a map and a checklist wouldn't have done me any good at all. Instead, coming in blindly allowed me to stay longer when I wanted to stay and move on quickly when something didn't catch my attention or peak my interest.

Having the collective experience of viewing the Bruce High Quality Foundation's piece I Like America and America Likes Me was a unique moment in the visit, being the first and last time that all seven of us experienced a piece together through interaction and conversation. I don't know that everyone was equally intrigued by this piece, nor am I asserting that everyone will remember it - but from this point on, after viewing the BHQF's Hearse converted into an ambulance with the windshield functioning as a screen for a slightly distorted video piece, each of us will have a unique selective memory of those pieces of art that matter the most to us for one reason or another. For that first shared experience, we all were able to experience something together, although this is not to say that all of our experiences were the same nor that all of our memories of the shared experience will be the same.

Fascinating, though, how each of us will come away from this and write something different about potentially disparate or potentially the same works. After we all parted ways and completely lost track of each other, each of us were able to take as much time as we needed looking at every piece of art that interested us, in a way being allowed to choose the most desired path for our own unique experiences. I had several passing moments with everyone, "dancing" with Susana a few times, sitting silently next to Caldwell during Kerry Tribe's video piece HM (which I fully intend to write more about once I feel that I can effectively compare it to Bergson), but rarely speaking with any of them in the hopes of maintaining our own unique, uninterrupted experiences. I don't necessarily enjoy conversing at a museum anyway both for fear of being rude or disturbing other patrons and the desire to quietly contemplate and live in the moment. This is why I agree with Sam's point that museums and art in general are sometimes best experienced alone - I think that Brian trying to be friendly and speak to a completely engrossed and therefore barely responsive version of myself while I was watching Abramovic's Rest Energy at MoMA is a testament to the point that art is sometimes best experienced in solitude - but, this is not to discourage the potential for an enlightened, collaborative conversation afterward.

..Katharine

Response to Hansen

2010-05-05T11:15:00.001-07:00

A new artform that has emerged recently emerged is Alternate Reality Games. An ARG is an interactive role-playing narrative in which players use various mediums to engage in a story that is told in real time. These games are rooted in the Internet and digital images / videos, however I think it is difficult to deny the immanence that exists in the participation. Although there is always a creator and a group of people leading the game, the story is being told in real time, by the players (anyone who wants to participate). Immanence also comes in the way that the users access the content. The content is often hidden and the users have to solve puzzles in order to access it. So everyone will find the media at different times, through different means, and often in different orders. Each player’s experience has a different “aura” around it.

This sort of digital art certainly includes moving images, however the image is not at the center of the piece. I do believe, however, that the moving image can be the central focus of Internet art. It will no longer cinema, or at least cannot be experienced the way that we are used to experiencing cinema, in a passive state. This would be ignoring the nature of the beast. It is not to say that cinema as we know it is obsolete, this is just a new form emerging.

As Hansen writes, “What we will discover in the process is that the frame in any form – the photograph, the cinemematic image, the video signal, and so on – cannot be accorded the autonomy Deleuze would give it since its very form (in any concrete deployment reflects the demands of embodied perception, or more exactly, a historically contingent negotiation between technical capacities and the ongoing “evolution” of embodied (human) perception” (8).

Recently, I have been conceiving of new ways to create video work for the Internet. One of these experiments is to live stream improvisational comedy sets to the Internet. Rather than just having one shot though, the viewer would have a chance of 5 cameras (a CU on each of the three actors, as well as a wide shot and a second camera that would be moving through the space to create two-shots). Each actor would also be mic’ed with static microphones as well, so the viewer can create their audio tracks as well. The interface of the website streaming the video would make it easy for the viewer to change the shots / audio and create their own cut of the piece as it is happening live. This is just a starting point, but the idea is to give everyone the opportunity to create their own experience as they are viewing a creative work.

--Jake

Nina Berman at the Whitney, Personal Identity and Deleuze

2010-05-05T10:06:00.000-07:00

Nina Berman's set of photographs called "Marine's wedding" is for me the strongest work of all shown in this year's Whitney biennial. It is a startling fusion of social and personal matters, politics and private life affairs, heroism and daily life survival, an extraordinary will to succeed and a failure - all in a single narrative and with the most modest means of a casual photograph. The earliest photographs of the disfigured Marine sergeant Ty Ziegel have been taken by the artist in the weeks preceding his wedding with his fiance Renee Kline. The tension in the relationship, the pressure of mutual obligations and growing estrangement are palpable in these images. The wedding portrait is especially striking. Still, the work would not have been complete without the photographs of Ty taken by the artist a little later, after his divorce with Renee. They are both reassuring and disturbing: they show Ty settled in his new life more or less comfortably, accepting his condition - and also embracing the military culture despite the cost (a photograph of him holding a gun with his right hand and the stump of his left hand is especially unsettling). These images raise so many disquieting questions - of the crime of war, the notions of duty, and of our inability to believe that a personal sacrifice to a great cause might be a mindless blunder. The issue that resonates most with me, however, is the one of personal identity and change, which Berman's projects evokes in such a painful way.

Is the disfigurement of the body affects a personal identity? Is Ty recovered after the bombing the same Ty his fiancee had known before? Does the moral obligations towards the "old" Ty still hold towards the "new" Ty? What is the personality, after all? Is it in the body, in the mind, in the sum of person's experience? How is the self-identity preserved despite the changes in the body or mind? The questions of identity and personal identity are among the central themes of philosophy, but as any philosophical question, they never get resolved or even explored sufficiently. One of the earliest views (e.g., Plato, Descartes) suggests that the personal identity is associated with immaterial substance (soul or mind), which is independent, though closely related to body and controls it in a way rather similar to how a pilot controls a his ship. A rival (materialistic) view would of course posit identity of a person in the substance of his or her body. In the late 1960s John Locke proposed a novel approach to thinking about personal identity and identity in general. He distinguished between the identities of atoms, groups of atoms and living thins. An atom does not change over time, so its identity is self-determined at any moment. Identities of groups of atoms are defined by their constituent atoms, regardless of the ways in which they are organized. Identities of living things (and more broadly, functional objects) are defined by their functions. The functions may persist in the objects despite changes in their structure: so a computer with a new mouse or a keyboard is the same computer; while the non-functional collection of the computer's part is not the same computer anymore. The most important function for living things is the continuation of life; regardless of structure and organization, the same life provides the criterion of identity for anything living, be it a dog or a bee. Therefore, the identity of a man is defined by his living body. This view, clearly, shifts the question of identity from substance to function.

However, Lock proposes an additional criterion for personal identities of humans. The identity of a person (as opposed to "man", a biological organism) is defined by psychological continuity: a person A before a certain event is identical to a person B after the event if person B is psychologically evolved out of A. Therefore, personal identity "depends on consciousness, not on substance". A thought experiment, in which a a prince's mind which enters the body of a cobbler, may be used to illustrate this view: a prince's consciousness in a cobbler's body defines his identity as that of prince's, despite his body being identical to that of the cobbler's. The definition of personal identity based on the psychological continuity, however, raises other problems. For example, if a person is unconscious or asleep, how is his identity determined?

Deleuze's lifelong project was his attempt to establish the ontology of difference. In a traditional view, difference is thought of as a relation between two terms with predetermined identities and as such is subordinated to identity. In Deleuze, on the contrary, difference is a transcendental principle. Different terms are related through difference itself, without any reference to identity. Accordingly, personal identity for Deleuze is in the process of individuation (notion derived tom from Gilbert Simondon's theory). His view seems to agree with many of our personal intuitions about ourselves. We would not equate ourselves with the infants that we had been at some time in the past. In some instances, we feel strongly that our personal identity is drastically different from that a year or 5 years ago as a result of an accident, a move to another country, or a decisive change in life such as a death or birth of someone dear to us, etc. Our bodies and minds are in the process of continuos transformation, which defines what we are in every single moment. At the same time, many ethical questions seem to be inseparable from the notions of stable identity. After all, what justifies our holding a person morally responsible for some past action? And what would be the moral obligation of and towards a person ever transforming through the ongoing process of individuation? Deleuze seems not to be particularly interested in ethical questions that arise with the process-based definitions of identity, but this may be a rich a challenging subject for Deleuzian philosophers. I can only vaguely imagine the principles of of such process-based ethics (a fascinating and possibly terrifying view).

Below is the link to Nina Berman's personal website with the photographs from "Marine's wedding"
http://www.ninaberman.com/anb_port.php?dir=mw&mn=prt

Tatiana

Hansen and Bergson

2010-05-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

I started this as a comment on Ariel's post, but it sort of became its own thing. Ariel is probably right in saying that datamoshing poses the question of smoothness and immanence in the digital more than a question of time. He is also right in pointing out Hansen's desire to find the smooth space within the digital space. What I would like to argue in this post is that Hansen cannot find immanence in the digital because he fundamentally misreads (and actually inverts) Bergson's concept of perception as subtraction.

Hansen acknowledges this discrepancy between himself and Bergson but frames it as a simple update in Bergson's theories rather than a conflicting or alternate argument. On pages 10 to 11 Hansen writes, "In relation to today's electronic technosphere, however, Bergon's theorization of this process of embodied selection must be updated in at least one important respect: rather than selecting preexistent images, the body now operates by filtering information directly and, through this process, creating images" (all italics are his own). Hansen is here essentially claiming that the (human) body adds images to the world through a selection of information from the world which is gathered by machines. We see this argument reflected in his claims that: the image of virtual action exits only within the body of the perceiver on page 58, his concept of "equipotentiality," (or the ability to create meaning through selection) on page 83 and the "transpactial dimension of conciousness" (the world created by this meaning) also on page 83. This assertion should be questioned from two fronts: 1) is it possible to claim that the body can create images and leave Bergson's theories intact and 2) in what way does the "electronic technosphere" bring about this change?

Let's begin with the first question: on page 51 Hansen relates "a hightened ability to view and use the world according to one's notions, more individually, more subjectively" (quoting Peter Weibel) with "a form of selection akin to Bergson's conception of perception as subtraction." (As an aside I would like to mention my utter distaste for the term "use the world" which implies a violence I find upsetting.) It is important to question this reading of perception as subtraction. If we turn to Bergson's own writing on the subject I think we find a critique of just this idea. Discussing the materialists' and dualists' shared view that perceptions are separate and therefore added to the world Bergon writes on pages 11 and 12:

"Is it possible to conceive of our nervous system as living apart from the organism which nourishes it, from the atmosphere in which the organism breathes, from the earth which that atmosphere envelopes, from the sun round which the earth revolves? More generally, does not the fiction of an isolated material object [the brain] imply a kind of absurdity, since this object borrows its physical properties from the relations which it maintains with all others, and owes each of its determinations, and consequently its very existence, to the place which it occupies in the universe as a whole?"

Bergson does not refute the idea that the actions of the brain influence the actions of the body, but he does refute the idea that the brain, and our subjectivity with it, is separate from the world. Unlike Hansen's system where a "subjectivity" or "individual" creates their world through a selection (which Hansen erroneously equates with subtraction) of the meaningful, or the to-be-acted-upon, Bergson sees the brain, and thus our subjectivity, as a conduit through which the stimuli of the world act. As Bergson writes on pages 20 and 21, "the nervous system is in no sense an apparatus which may serve to fabricate, or even to prepare, representations. Its function is to receive stimulation, to provide motor apparatus and to present the largest possible number of these apparatuses to a given stimulus". Here Bergson radically and explicitly claims that our body does not create our perception of the world upon which it then acts, but simply provides a complicated hub for actions and reactions to intermingle and that from this subjectivity arises, not the other way around. We can see here that Hansen's concept of "equipotentiality" flips Bergson's ideas on its head and that the two are irreconcilable with each other. The body simply cannot be both a separate, outside, and added, quality to the world while simultaneously being created by and in the world.

If Hansen's ideas clash with Bergson's we should at least investigate Hansen's reason for this difference. As was mentioned above, Hansen views this difference as an updating of, not a counter-argument to, Bergson. The reason given for this update is new media technology. Considering the actual significance of these diverging arguments, that would mean that pre-digital consciousness was Bergsonian, in that it did not create images but arose from them, and that post-digital consciousness was subsequently endowed with just this ability. This is an argument that I believe Hansen cannot even agree with. What in the digital is so drastically new as to separate our consciousness from the world? Hansen himself continuously argues that no such drastic alteration exists since the digital does not alter us (à la Kittler) but instead extends and reflects us (which is another point that I take contention with, but that's for its own post). For Hansen, digital imaging allows us to expand a quality already innately existing within the body long before digital imaging was invented.

All this brings us back to immanence in the digital. If, as Hansen suggests, the digital is an extension of our subjectivity outside of the world Deleuze would undoubtedly say there is no immanence to be found there. According to this position new media only adds a level of realism to the metaphysical myth of the separate isolated personhood existing above and outside of the world. Thankfully, I don't think Hansen is correct. It seems to me that Hansen is looking for the distinctive qualities of new media in the wrong place, namely in the human. Do not the qualities of any medium arise precisely when we release it from the reflection of the human? Painting became about painting when it escaped human perception; film became about film when it escaped human action. I believe that the immanent qualities of new media do exist, but they will reveal themselves when we escape the human rather than replicate it.

http://www.thechrisrice.com/trash.html

-Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa

Anything Can Make You Think

2010-05-05T00:57:00.000-07:00

Some days ago I received one of those funny-chain-letters with another "pearl" from home. It was the above photo of a fresco in a village church in Serbia. The man represented on the fresco made his fortune by selling parts for Skoda cars. He financed the complete restoration of the church for which he got a portrait on its wall with his two wives and children, obviously, along with a ticket to a safe journey into Heaven.

At first, I laughed, of course.

Then I thought that probably the only thing that could be despised is bad painting. For, there is no essential difference between this man and for example, Renaissance patrons. What substantially distinct one from the other are the painters they chose. The man's act, however, is one of a long tradition (as long as our Western civilization) of fighting immortality by keeping one's name in the (collective) memory. Unlike Barthes, who maintains that the author, or the insistence on the individual genius (but also, the prioritization of the Individual, in general) is a product of the period usually widely covered by the name of the Humanism and Renaissance, I tend to think that its root can be found much earlier. It is expressed in Achilles' choice of the name over a long life. Not only that the period that followed the Middle Ages was a grand revitalization of the classical heritage, therefore, a re-adoption of the classical aesthetics and notions, but, in my opinion, its philosophical and moral findings have never stopped being the pillars of our modern era. One of them is the notion of the name that carries on existing beyond one's death, thus prolonging the life, and embedding the transient into a concrete and enduring. In order to remain "alive" even the life itself becomes worth sacrificing. If one does not have a name – a denominator for one's works and days, it is almost as if one never existed… If we try and remove external layers, deeper beneath, we might find a desire to communicate, to address this world, by being heard and seen, to stay in this world.

While riding on the train and thinking these thoughts, I see a title in somebody's book that curiously prolongs my thought: Earthen cup is a solidification of perspective. … Our bodies are solidifications of our minds… Worringer comes to mind. Abstraction has no perspective, no spatiality, the body is absent, therefore, it addresses "the life-renouncing, inorganic" – the transcendental. The art of "empathy" is all turned to this world and its "organic beauty". So is our civilization, Western civilization. Thus we sense ourselves. Thus we communicate among ourselves. Once we have drunk from the earthen cup, we can start our nomadic lives, through which we travel to the reader. Surely the author is not and should not impose himself as a God with the ultimate message. However, if his "message" is completely depersonalized, and "his hand, detached from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of inscription", I'm afraid the author wont reach the reader… for, this reader has also been shaped through this organic sensibility, and he expects to be addressed by an organic form. …Whether this is a vicious or only the earthen circle, I'm not quite sure. Yet again, what Barthes says about Greek tragedy may be the finest example of the personal organically woven within the formally pure, as well as of the ever-existing Reader without the necessity of being ransomed by the Author's death.

Vladana

The Digital and Immanence Co-Implicated, or A Minor-Digital

2010-05-04T23:55:00.000-07:00

In reading Hansen I've been returned back to the concept of the smooth and the striated being co-implicated. One of the most interesting aspects of this was illustrated by Deluze and Guattari in ATP when they said that all progress must take place within striated space while all becoming occurs in smooth space (ATP, 486). I talked about this a little in my presentation (part B). Immanence is implicated by striated technology that operates at such a scale and velocity that immanence is able to be implicated. The way in which striation is connected to technology is given an example in Mandelbrot's fractals (ATP, 486-488). These fractal images would not have been possible with out the increasingly iterable computational tools available to Mandelbrot. The systematic approach of fractal geometry is a good example according to D&G because it "provides a general determination for smooth space that takes into account its differences from and the relations to striated space" (ATP, 488).

The example is but one of many instances in which a striated system can function in a way that implicates an immanent concept. For me, I think that this is also the case in cinema. The technology of the movement-image is such that it accelerates the static technology of photography to such a velocity that not only is movement implicated, but time as well. Deleuze would argue that the implicated becoming in cinema is not movement but time. Hansen's search for what is "new" in new media holds a similar affinity to Deleuze's search for what is co-implicated in cinema (Hansen, 21). Although he takes his conclusions in a rather non-Deleuzian direction I believe his starting point is very important. What does the striation that produces the digital (image/media) co-implicate? What kind of immanent concepts can the digital imply? Hansen seems to focus on the way in which the digital striates the status of representation in media and therefore shifts the origin of meaning and interpretation to the body.

If we put Hansen's conclusions aside how would we provide a "general determination [of] smooth space that takes into account the differences from and the relations to striated space"? (ATP, 488) A single equation can be repeated enough to imply a conception of natural forms in the case of fractals (ie. the geometry of leaves and mountains). A single frozen slice of action/time can be taken again and again a such a rate such that it implies movement and time in the cinematic image. What does the digital striate? How are these qualities expressed in the 'major" media of digital? How are they different and related to the immanent qualities that it quantifies? If there are indeed immanent potentialities within digital technology would a "minor" digital be possible? What would minor digital be like?

For this reason I'm not sure that the reason that data-moshing as Benjamin posted for us implicates movement or time but something quite different (see Movement and the Digital Image). Just as the cinematic image implicates movement and time because of its unique relation to time so then would minor digital implicate immanence due to it's unique relation to smooth space. Data-moshing perhaps asks questions about the digital itself. It foregrounds what Lev Manovich describes as the digital image as only being the surface of pure data (Hansen, 32).

As you may of noticed, I'm not really sure what the digital truly striates. My initial instinct is that the digital striates process and procedure. This is what Manovich calls the processural image (Hansen, 9). Maybe what the digital striates is then a certain cognitive logic and the thing that a minor digital can implicate is a continuum of thought.

-Ariel

In Defense of Narrative

2010-05-04T23:49:00.001-07:00

Throughout the semester, but particularly in recent weeks during our discussions of Gilles Deleuze's Cinema 1 (1983) and Cinema 2 (1985), Peter Frampton's Filmosophy (2006) and more generally the opposition between traditional film studies (in which technical analyses relate disparate elements back to narrative causality) and modern film studies (in which the medium's more affective visual and aural properties are considered), we've tended to speak very dismissively of narrative analysis. Our conversation last week turned to film textbooks such as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's Film As Art: An Introduction (first edition 1979), an introductory text that offers its close and exhaustive analysis of mainstream Hollywood cinema as a dominant paradigm against which to compare other works produced within and without that system like a cardinal point for film students to get their bearings from, rather than a rigid, proscriptive set of questions to be put to every movie. But to dismiss this type of analysis out of hand is to make the same error that practitioners of that school of film studies commit in assuming the causal relationship between some shot A and the following shot B while ignoring an affective, non-narrative analysis. Simply put: we should not forgo narrative analysis simply because its scholars tend to forgo affective analyses.

Indeed, much of the cinema that Deleuze espouses in Cinema 2, particularly Italian neo-realisn and the French New Wave, is by no means non-narrative. Rather, films of those periods marked fairly radical breaks with the dominant modes of filmic storytelling at the time. Films by De Sica, Visconti, Antonioni, Truffaut and Godard are narrative, even in as much as they seek, more or less self-reflexively, to unsettle our habituated modes of watching and experiencing narrative cinema. Even such creative and formally audacious films rely in some manner or another on film's capacity to convey a story. The implication that seemed to be raised in class, that studies of film that construe technical and formal features as devices for narrative development are not worth our consideration, strikes me as dangerously close-minded.

Some of the most radical studies of film have undertaken such analyses to suggest the subversive possibilities for what might appear to be very conservative texts. I'm thinking, for instance, of Robin Wood's hyper-politicized writings on studio-era and immediately post-studio era American cinema, based on narrative and technical analysis, in books such as Sexual Politics and Narrative Film: Hollywood and Beyond (1998) and Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (1986). Or, Frederic Jameson's extremely rigorous Marxist interpretations of films like Jaws (1975), Dog Day Afternoon (1975) and The Godfather (1972) in "Class Allegory in Contemporary Mass Culture" (1977), with his particular focus on the process of adaptation from novel or true story into fiction film. These and many other astute film studies scholars demonstrate that viewers experience cinema as both an affective series of sounds and images and, the majority of the time, also as narrative. To champion analysis of the one at the expense of the other is to do the reader, viewer and the work under consideration all a great disservice, and leaves the resulting study critically incomplete.

-Benjamin Sutton

Downtown Rhizome

2010-05-04T14:34:00.000-07:00

Right now I am in the process of structuring the short film that I am going to make for my final project. Writing a post about the film, serves two purposes for me: 1.) Maybe get some feedback, please feel free to comment to me in class or on the blog 2.) Processing my thoughts about how I am going to edit the film and impart the relevant theories from class into the editing process and hopefully the film.

In the past, when I have made a film I always started with a story. I have made two films, one shot on 16mm and one on 35mm and both were deemed “experimental” when they played at festivals. What I find interesting about this labeling of my work is the fact that my intent in both pieces was to tell a narrative story. I really did not think of my work as experimental ? Anyhow, in the piece for class, tentatively titled DOWNTOWN RHIZOMES, my intent is to create an experimental piece of work. When I read Deleuze and Guattari’s “A Thousand Plateau’s” I became very excited because I immediately connected with the section on Rhizomes and I also had an idea about how to apply this form to my own work. Over a period of time and taking classes to complete my MA in Media studies I have acquired bits and pieces of work that I really like but never knew how to string together? My favorite is some 16mm footage of China town, HD footage of Little Italy and some digital photography of New York City. Reading Deleuze gave me the inspiration to put them all together and create a mapping of my Manhattan experience.

For me, the following statements are the inspiration for my piece, “ …any point of a rhizome can be connected to any other… a rhizome may be broken, but it will start up again on one of its old lines” Combining my 16 mm, HD footage and taking some new digital photos of Manhattan was going to be my study of rhizome as a form for cinema. Hopefully I can get all of these different “species” of media to interact and make something that resonates with my thoughts on Deleuze and is interesting to watch!

I have posted some of the new photos that I have taken for the piece. I am still debating whether or not to include the digital photography? I have to really start editing and look at the three forms and see if they work together. I am positive that the 16mm footage and HD footage will interact beautifully but I am a little unsure about the photos.

Deirdre

Henri Cartier Bresson, the Eye and the Immanent Frame

2010-05-04T07:11:00.000-07:00

The retrospective show of Henri Cartier Bresson’s career’s worth of photography at MoMA captures the work of a groundbreaking imagist who wrote the genre of the photo essay, started what is arguably the most important photo-house (Magnum), and retired from full time photography only to take on the movement image and illustration work. His work spanned the world, and the depth of the images and subject matter speak not only to artistic construction, but effective and engaging social critique – an immanent frame.

Any discussion of Henri Cartier Bresson’s photography requires a discussion of the importance of time and framing. Bresson’s own ideas of photography grew out of painting, and his link to fine art informed his photographic work. His own explanations of his work center around the concept of “The Decisive Moment” and an “impassioned eye.” It is these concepts that I want to consider in their relation to the concept of “the frame.”

Bresson’s work has framed some of the most important faces and places of the 20th century and I posit that without his work, new media artists and photographers would be ill-suited to accomplish the depth and breadth required of any photographic medium. His use of time and frame are at the base of this argument.

In considerations of “the frame” Bresson states that, “To take a photograph means to recognize— simultaneously and within a fraction of a second — both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning” (2). To extend this idea, we might look to the Deleuzian ideas of context and how the present, past and future converge in genre-breaking artistic constructions, providing for a plane of immanence, a smooth surface upon which to travel towards social change. This “decisive moment” is the capture of a point instance of light, a part of the spectrum, a part of the waves of light, that exist before and after that moment. While I agree with Deleuze’s statements in Cinema 1 where he states that photography is a kind of ‘moulding’: "the mould organizes the internal forces of the thing is such a way that they reach a state of equilibrium,” I don’t agree that the “cast” that is taken in that photography is just the literal “luminous imprint” (25). What I believe is being ignored are the smooth surfaces from which the image was taken and the timelessness of the surfaces within the images themselves.

A good example of this is one of Bresson’s most famous works, and image of a person hopping over the majority of a puddle, the image was created a split second before the person disrupted the surface of the water, this provides an infinity of smooth water and an infinity of conceived splashes and surface disruption. An “impassioned eye” allows for a point instance to exist beyond the instance of itself, thus rendering it not “timeless” but rather, infinite — in understanding, in immanence.

A well-traveled man, open to the experiences of submersive travel and reportage, Bresson was privy to humanity in its various permutations. His work documenting Mexican prostitution is a great example of this, finding the humanity in the painted eyes and in the framing in doors and in doorways. In these images we see multiple framing, both by the prostitute in the hatches in the door, then by the door itself, and finally through Bresson’s camera lens. This multiplicity of frames places the prostitute in a self-referential frame (the hatch), a societal frame (the door), and that of the photographer (the lens). It is the multiplicity that allows for a deepened interpretation of the still — and a static image that transcends the static place of Mexico City in the 1940s and does not simply preserve the moment, but reinforces the forever issues of comodified sex, exploitation and our own referential framing.

--Mike von Wahlde

Deleuze and (Modern) Political Cinema: “The People are Missing”

2010-05-03T17:39:00.000-07:00

In chapter eight of Cinema 2, Deleuze discusses what he calls “minor cinema,” and in the context of the modern political cinema of such filmmakers as Glauber Rocha, Ousmene Sembene, and Pierre Perrault (a Brazilian, an African, and a French Canadian, respectively). Political film of the classical period is premised on the idea that “the people are already there” (C2: 216): the people pre-exist their representation in film. In this cinema the filmmaker’s role is to bring to light, in a representative fashion, the concerns and struggles of the people. As Rodowick says (in Deleuze’s Time Machine, the first book-length study of Deleuze’s two volume work on cinema to appear in English and still probably the best one), the goal of political film in the classical period is “to represent the masses or ‘the people.’ They may be oppressed or in the process of liberation, alienated or awakened, but representation is nonetheless their right. That they are representable as a collective image, and that their political self-consciousness is also renderable in images, are givens” (1997: 152). All political films, documentary or otherwise, premised on the notion that the filmmaker is simply and objectively recording a reality to which he or she remains external or detached would be an instance of this kind of classical political cinema.

Modern political cinema begins from a very different position, premised not on the “already there” of the people but on their absence. In the words of the experimental Italian theatrical director Carmelo Bene, “the people are missing.” Bene says this in response to the query: for whom is your theatre addressed, to which people are they addressed? Bene’s answer: his work is addressed to a people who do not yet exist; a people who do not preexist their performative enunciation through, or with, the work of art. This, according to Deleuze, is also the answer found in modern political cinema. The stakes involved in proclaiming the people “missing” is nowhere more evident than in the postcolonial cinema of Rocha and Sembene. These filmmakers, Deleuze argues, understand that what is required is not simply an assertion of an identity counter to the one proposed in colonial rule; they thus resist the urge to evoke dubious notions of “origins” – a true identity, a unified peoples, prior to colonialist domination – and, instead, actively seek to forge a new collectivity, a people who belong not to the past, to history, but to the future: the people as future conditional. “This acknowledgement of a people who are missing is not a renunciation of political cinema,” Deleuze writes, “but on the contrary the new basis on which it is founded” (C2: 217). It is because the people are missing, rather than present, that there is a necessity for political art.

***

For me, Deleuze’s remarks on “minor cinema” remains the most interesting of all his discussions of the “minor” in art (far more convincing than the arguments about “minor literature” that Deleuze and Guattari ascribe to Kafka). I find compelling his commentary on Rocha and Sembene and, along these lines, if I had time, I could add a few examples of my own (including the work of the great heretical Italian Marxist filmmaker and provocateur Pier Paolo Pasolini). Having said this, I’ve never been entirely convinced by Deleuze’s critique here of the work of Sergei Eisenstein as an instance of classical political cinema (and which has been repeated rather thoughtlessly by various Deleuze scholars, including R. Bogue). Does Eisenstein really presume the existence of a revolutionary proletariat, or does he see it as his – and other artist’s – responsibility to provoke or stimulate this revolutionary form of consciousness through the work of art? In the Soviet Union of the 1920s, the revolution has already occurred – literally so – but what remains unknown is the nature of the future communist society: what will it look like and what role the people will play. It is to this future collective that Eisenstein pitches his works. What interest Eisenstein is the ability of cinematic montage to stimulate both affective and cognitive responses and it is the imbrication of these two modes of spectatorial activity that allows cinema not simply to entertain its audience but also to transform them.

In this sense, we can’t say that the revolutionary proletariat pre-exist the cinema; the revolutionary proletariat is a being-in-formation and the cinema is one of the mediums through which it comes into existence. For Eisenstein, this meant that cinema needed to be pure experimentation, a mode of non-representational art in which the cinematic “image” is produced by the spectator in their encounter with a series of shots whose meaning is relational, whose meaning results from the tension produced by individual shots placed in conflict or collision, and which the viewer must resolve for himself or herself. This kind of experimentation became anathema in Stalinist Russia and precisely because the central administration no longer wished to provoke an (unpredictable) becoming; instead the goal became the affirmation of an identity that is already formed and complacent and a “true” ideology that doesn’t require thinking or feeling, only obedience. (Is it any surprise that Socialist Realism took the exact same "form" as classical Hollywood films, with their stories centered on the heroic exploits of the protagonist and the editing as unobtrusive as possible, so as to facilitate the suture of spectator to narrative, spectator to representation. Thought is no longer mandatory. Thought becomes optional.)

***

Those interested in the topic of art and the political, as well as Deleuze’s notion of the “minor,” might take a look sometime at Nicholas Thoburn’s excellent book on the “minor politics” of Karl Marx entitled simply Deleuze, Marx and Politics. Thoburn argues that Marx doesn’t posit communism as the simple description of a predetermined, and fully worked out, perspective or methodology but rather “a process of continual engagement with the flows and constraints of the capitalist socius towards its overcoming” (2003: 3). If it takes Marx sixteen years to complete the endlessly-revised Capital, Thoburn says, it is precisely because he is sensitive to the mutations that capitalism undergoes in the second half of the nineteenth century and because he is aware that such a strategic, dynamic mode of critique must also characterize communist politics. Marx thus re-configures communism as an immanent political practice, one that continuously discovers, or creates, a line of flight through the networks of capitalist production. “Marx presents the Communist Party, then, not as a distinct and timeless organizational form, but as a mode of engagement that is immanent to the content of the proletarian-in-struggle, which in turn is immanent to the particular configurations of capital” (Thoburn 2003: 40). The "proletariat" thus no longer simply refers to a particular group of people but to a revolutionary potential – a virtual potential – that awaits its actualization in, and as, our future.

S I-G

The Whitney, Alone

2010-05-01T06:19:00.000-07:00

It always annoys me that one is not able to take photographs or video while wandering through museums (at least in NYC; the same rule didn't apply the last time I was at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris). While I appreciate the fact that it saves me from having to view tourists gathering around art objects for a photo – indeed, now that I think about it, maybe it's not such a dumb rule after all – I still resent the fact that one can only do this (take a photograph) clandestinely. For me, often the most interesting "visual" within a gallery space is not found in the art work itself but in the relation that is established, or not, between work and spectator. I like to see the art work refracted through the movements – or stillness – of the museum's visitors, sometimes huddled in masses; sometimes exposed and alone. I particularly like when the latter occurs, which rarely happens in the cluttered spaces of NYC museum spaces. It was thus nice to see less, rather than more, at the more modestly-scaled Whitney Biennial 2010, although I think they should have cleared another floor for the new exhibition, giving the works even more "breathing" room. Above are three (illicit) images from Ari Marcopoulos's Detroit, projected on a wall-sized screen in a large, mostly empty room, as part of this year's selection. (Note the size of the image in relation to the emergency "Exit" sign.) By this point, I had lost track of where most of the students had gone – ciao Susana, Brian, Caldwell, Maria, Raul, Lukas, Katherine – and it was okay. Art needs a bit of solitude. I like too the experience of leaving such an event and re-entering the "real" world alone. This is what we need more time for: art and solitude. Indeed, what is art except this ability to experience – however fleetingly, however momentarily – a bit of solitude from a world that assaults us at all times and on all fronts. A solitude that allows us to return to the world with renewed interest and attentiveness (the world in all its depth and opacity) as well as a renewed commitment to resistance: to resist the false solicitations that lead us to trivialize the world and ourselves.

S I-G