Media Ecology and Images

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

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

Henri Cartier Bresson, the Eye and the Immanent Frame

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

Earth Moving, and Vice Versa

I barely remember my life without my skateboard. All things environmental and architectural are thrown through the lens of the concave and convex meeting of plys of Canadian maple on a polyurethane conglomerate wheel, suspended in a polyurethane tension above a street and space most likely not contoured for use by said vehicle. I couldn’t help but consider all of Cache’s writing through that same lens — there are a devastating amount of points of intersection between the ideas he posits and the seemingly simplistic manners in which the skateboarder exists with the urban, or even suburban, architectural schema.

Cache states that “fuctionalism in architecture means that the form serves the function […] there is an essential difference between the frame of probability and the effect that is produced within it” (29). Consider also, for example, the idea of inflection, in his drawings of inflection (40), are the basic foot movements employed by skateboarders in order to propel the board into the air. A roll of the foot, a sweep of the ankle and a series of frictions are an individualized interface in a primary space defined through topography and material construction. The resulting action is an art of the here and now — not separate from the “artist,” as the artist is the actor, but a conglomeration of time, space, talent, skill, geography and topography.

These ideas can also be seen in some of the more advanced artwork growing from skateboard culture. Using the detritus of broken boards, artists like Brandon Shigeta’s sculptures as not only as representations of the architectural, curvaceous, interaction of skateboarding, but also with the media themselves — the wood and the color of pressed hard rock maple.



to be cont...

--Mike v.W.

Forces at Work: The Poetry of Ammons and Frost

In the discussion/lecture of last night (3/10/10), and in the intermix of my own instruction regarding Transcendentalism (Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, etc.), I could not help but consider the poetry of AR Ammons (particularly the poem Identity) and Robert Frost’s poem Design.

Ammons’ poetry concerned itself with finding and exploring forces at work in nature. Concerned heavily with these forces, and similar to the Transcendentalists a century before, much of his work drew parallels between what we see in nature and the conceptual struggles of man. Similar too was a concentration on contextualization, which, so far at least, seems prevalent in our readings of Deleuze – the interrelations of opposites, the relationships between the object and its ability to produce a new becoming. The Uexküll readings on ethology further the importance of connections between milieus as areas of importance and worthy of study.

Considering Deleuze’s idea “There is no longer a form, but only relations of velocity between infinitesimal particles of an unformed material. There is no longer a subject, but only individuating affective states of an anonymous force” (128) then the ideas of interactive force must come into play in the construction of anything. This consideration of force I believe is rather inherent in Ammons’ work. The aforementioned "Identity" tackles this idea in its analysis of a simple spider web. Ammons states that “possibility is high along the peripheries of / spider /webs: / you can go all / around the fringing attachments // and find / disorder ripe, / entropy rich, high levels of random, / numerous occasions of accident.”

Similar too, is Ammons’ observation that order / diminishes toward the / periphery / allowing at / the points of contact / entropy equal to entropy.” Is this the milieu-shaping self-reflection/self-consciousness we discussed re: Uexkull, Spinoza and Deleuze last night?

Some conflicts in this application do exist – the idea that the web itself is a “form” that is unique to the genus of spider, but the concentration of the poem is on the ability of the spider to fit within a greater schema that steps outside its own perception – its web is there only to serve its purpose yet other purposes are inherent within a greater world view. Maybe through this interpretation of identity as milieu, the spider’s identity serves as a particular force acting within the non-static worlds in which it must be spun.

This is similar to Robert Frost’s poem "Design", where he posits that the event of a spider eating a moth on a “white heal-all” proves that there are design elements that are beyond our understanding at work in nature. This might be some of the earlier thought that helped set the stage for a truly modern understanding of science – a world evolving outside the simplistic understanding, i.e. our human milieu.

--mike vw

12 Steps and Bourriaud

I tried to step around Bourriaud’s comments on cinema and tweak it to discuss a low brow cinema of sorts. This may be a stretch.

http://www.alexkopps.com/work/12.Step_Kopps.mov

12 steps by Alex Kopps answers the issues of relational aesthetics as posited by Bourriaud. Considering the transitivity of the work itself and the manner in which the film directly interacts with the viewer, the defined assemblage of artist, object, action and beholder creates a ‘specific sociability’ providing an immanent “conviviality” (p28). The work provides a mirror for artist and beholder, creating an internal dialogue, a reflection on practice within a social network, as well as a guide for the beholder towards further invention.

Kopp’s own practice is defined through the film itself – outlining a simple manner of creating yet another piece of art. If “An artist’s artwork thus acquires the status of an ensemble of units to be re-activated by the beholder-manipulator […] The principle act(s) as a trajectory evolving through signs objects, forms, gestures” (P20) then the construction of the art suggested by the film is actually threefold: the construction of an animation, the construction of the film itself, and the assumed production/construction by the beholder.

Culturally, the film speaks to the ability of the everyman to create art. Couched in a 12 step program, popularized by groups such as AA in order to deal with addictions, the resources used by Kopps are accessible to the everyday person. This provides for the beholder the possibility of artist production — a sense of immanent art. Each step is laid out in its own simplicity — riding the bicycle to the store, the deconstruction of the screen, the banal commentary, the fact that the film is a tracing on multiple levels.

The relations of the artist (and assumingly the beholder) to the consumer society within which we operate are present on the surface, as well are various simple ways of subverting that same system. The superficiality and simplicity lend themselves to a cultural criticism that evokes social networking and a collective intelligence. Kopps use of the bicycle to procure the monitor is an example of this subversion: it is a simple alternative to the car, accessible even to the underprivileged; the deconstruction of the monitor lends itself to the deconstruction of the computer and technology saturated society — or alludes to the strength of usage versus nascent consumption.

Bourriaud states that, “It seems possible, in our view, to describe the specific nature of present-day art with the help of the concept of creating relations outside the field of art (in contrast to relations inside it, offering its socio-economic underlay): relations between individuals and groups, between the artist and the world, and by way of transitivity, between the beholder and the world" (p26). The DIY culture of the Internet, and the collective intelligence of it’s arts and crafts community where this video has been posted and reposted across the blogosphere, is made deeper through this commentary. It’s reposting adds to its cultural capital and reinforces the production and consumption cycle. This is further anchored in the use of grayscale, which adds a feigned “historicity” to the film image; and the use of the computer generated voice – taking away, in essence, the artist’s own voice, relying on the beholder to fabricate their own interpretation of what is actually being said and what they are being instructed to do. Kopps accomplished this in a low-brow instructional film that both deconstructs and constructs, providing for what might be made to be a plane of immanence.

--Mike vW